


Slice of Death

by skaralding



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Post-Hogwarts, Rape Fantasy, Rough Sex, Serial Killer Original Female Character, Serial Killers, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-08-27 05:13:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16696099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skaralding/pseuds/skaralding
Summary: Sally Hitchens is not your average serial killer. For one thing, she's a witch. For another, she's got good reasons, really quite good reasons, for the things she does, the people she removes. Someone has to dosomethingabout all the men that won't hear 'no', after all; it might as well be her.





	1. initial rise

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story about a serial killer who's (probably) not off her rocker. There won't be long loving descriptions of torture or whatnot because that's not her thing. There will be a lot of references to past child abuse and sexual abuse due to the nature of her usual victims.
> 
> I have tagged this with 'rape fantasy' and 'rough sex' due to later scenes she has with another character.

This is how I did it. Simply:

Choose someone. Most likely a man. Alright, always a man, always. Check the stories told, check them again (depressing, necessary). Visit area on holiday, with research first. Empty his home, using as little magic as possible– preferably using no magic at all. Then kill him. Quickly.

Lingering not a good idea. Notes, by me or supposedly by him, _also_ not a good idea. I wanted the story around his death, their deaths, to be one word: senseless. Shocking, but not so very shocking that the Standard or the Daily Mail felt it was really interesting enough to wank about for more than a couple paragraphs three pages into that day’s paper. He died, how mysterious, how sad. Better still: gas leak. Tragic accident, electrocution in bath, shower, etc. Ran his car right into a tree, or wall, or that unluckily placed bollard. Must’ve been tired driving home, poor chap.

Taking them when they were tired made it so much easier.

Stupidly, I kept a list. Location names, followed by significant initials and shortened last names. Every month, I allowed myself two, perhaps three. Then burned the list at ten, in my grate, with what I still can’t help but think of as ‘real’ fire, not because I think it’ll keep me from being caught, but because it feels a bit more honest that way.

I know what I’m doing is wrong, if you look at it from the right perspective. No one’s ever going to completely approve of a witch that, though outwardly respectable, kills muggles on her holiday, every holiday. Especially when she really does holiday quite a lot.

I don’t kill _every_ holiday; that’d be a stupid pattern. I will admit, though, that there are times when I find myself taking an unscheduled stop, having heard or seen something in passing that makes a certain man particularly… interesting.

But not every holiday. I try to keep to that, and it’s hard, really hard, but I manage.

* * *

They aren’t always muggles. Wizards are, well, difficult, but not so hard as you’d think. Can’t go on holiday for them, it’s a different pattern there. It’s scrying mirrors, silver thread laid under their footsteps, rose thorns in the tea I hand them, my eyes cast down, my every breath respectful until the final moment, until it’s me and them and no one coming.

Them, I took my time with. Them, I must savour, because they are more carefully chosen, more difficultly won, the careful culls from a protected, privileged herd that knows really very little fear. Nothing I can do about the really well set up, hoity-toity lord-of-the-manor sort, but their men of business? Their help, their poorer relations, their aspiring friends? Yes, they are mine; they, at least, can be reached.

I found, sometimes, girls, women, boys, secreted in the house, after. Sometimes alive. The wizards’ houses, generally. Houses I did my level best to salt and burn, spiritually, to wipe out the least chance of some accusing ghost arising. The muggles’ houses, the two of them I’ve come across, I simply burned.

Real fire, again, in all those cases. No sense in leaving stupid telltales.

* * *

I’m not much liked, round the office. I keep my head down, though, and I bring in bakes roughly once every other week, so even though I don’t say much, I’m fairly well tolerated. I usually spend a lot of time in a corner of the lab, going over the new resin tests, trying the new paces of the new polish, dipping bunches of bristles in different batches of soakers, etc.

I don’t use potions, ever, on holiday. I had an E on the N.E.W.T., excellent for that year, considering the then-recent changes in scoring. It’s the first thing people think of when they look at me, likely, _oh, right, Sally Hitchens, E on her Potions NEWT, very quiet lass, that, no trouble_.

That’s how it was, at least, for my first year at Nimbus. It changed, soon enough; about once a year, the chorus about me changed. “Halfblood” got added, midway through my second year there. Then, in the third year, “knows her place” got slipped in before “no trouble”, all of it said with the right sort of complacent satisfaction, the sort that got the Ministry thug’s eyes gleaming in casual triumph.

I almost liked the speaker, after that. Samuelson, the department head that paid me the least attention, the one that went from strolling through the workroom once a month, bored black eyes taking in the praised new efficiencies, to sitting in Ms. Gilchrist’s chair day in and day out, when Ms. Gilchrist went missing.

I didn’t like her. Nice, but so very nosy and interested in my holidays (“Montreal? _Really?_ ) that I had to be just that bit extra careful in what I said to her, when I don’t like treating anyone specially. Even so, I know to the hour, still, the moment she went from hunching miserably over the Prophet to eyes wide, hand in her pocket, clutching the warning charm her husband had made for her.

No one had noticed. Very aggressively, no one noticed, when she’d tidied her desk a bit and said, shakily, that she was going to the toilet.

Still haven’t found her, the Ministry. I didn’t check, not compulsively, but I kept an eye out, and I kept failing to find her name on any one of their dreary lists.

* * *

When Voldemort died, I was… satisfied? But not happy.

Satisfied, because that’s one that couldn’t be reached, if there ever was, eh? The untouchable, unbreakable, unstoppably privileged murdering little shit.

I wonder why he had to give killing muggles such a bad name. Why he couldn’t just do it quietly, wait his turn a bit, and perhaps feature as the very last kill on my list. Because you just know he wouldn’t have chosen anyone sensible to take his ire out on, oh no, it’d be children, snotty posh children with puppies, perhaps. Or pretty girls that looked like that one girl that he hadn’t managed to charm back in the day, and even though he did get her, and kill her, he’s still sore on it, he still feels like he didn’t win, so he re-enacts it now and then to remind himself he did win, really. That he’ll always win, forever, etc etc.

Anyway, when he was proclaimed dead, I was satisfied, but not happy. Because while I had to change, or to be seen to change, my holiday destinations to places appropriately Wizarding and British (just how many times _can_ a girl see Stonehenge?), it was actually easier, in the boiling, fearful chaos of this and that happening, to get away with visits to muggles and wizards both.

Fifteen of them, in those last three months, enough that I’d been getting tired and wired and kind of sloppy. So I was unhappy when things returned to normal. I made myself stop for a bit, all the same, made myself join the boisterous office party, raising toasts as Samuelson called them, everyone giddy with relief and barrelling merrily on towards sloshed.

Gilchrist didn’t come back, probably having settled down off in wherever. But there was a new manager slotted in about a year after the big death and the bigger celebration, Angelina Johnson, and then Angelina Weasley two months after, because everyone was still getting panic married or relief married, and sensible as she seemed, she was obviously not immune.

I didn’t like her, either. Sensible and hands-off as she was, whenever she _did_ pay attention to me, she seemed to assume we had some sort of unspoken camaraderie due to the two of us being only a shade or two apart in the hues of our skin. It grated, sometimes, the way she persisted in it, the way she continued trying to include me in things for the sake of a solidarity that I knew I did not, and could not rely on.

I haven’t ever really considered telling her what I most enjoy about my holidays. I’m not stupid. But the thought of what telling her might be like floated through my mind now and then, seductively accompanied by the thought of the way her eyes might widen, if I told her. By the way she might look horrified, but just a little approving, when I explained how I made my selections.

So. Yes. I did not like her.

I did not avoid her, of course. It’d be suspicious; can’t have that. So I suppose it was somewhat inevitable that, three months after her marriage, I ended up going– getting rather carefully bullied into going– to a Weasley dinner.

Harry Potter– _the_ Harry Potter–was there, stroppy and scowling and looking close to some sort of breakdown. He argued, in harsh whispers, with a narrow-eyed redhead I thought had been introduced as Ginny, and then disappeared off into the house with her, only to return in half an hour looking pink-cheeked and freshly shagged, and still stroppy.

It’d have been hilarious if it weren’t such a dangerous situation. Free entertainment if I were only there as a fly on the wall, rather than a New Person, a Nice Girl from Angelina’s Work, and therefore to be watched at all times, asked how much I liked the pudding (quite a bit, thank you), and then asked if things had been very bad, at Nimbus.

“We got on somehow,” was all I could say, into the small, uncomfortable hush that had descended when I opened my mouth. “Our manager, you see, she and her husband were…”

“What?” Angelina said, eyes wide and upset. “That’s not what I heard. That– I was _told_ – I’d never have–”

“It’s all right,” I said, hastily, cursing myself for having obviously used the wrong tone. I hadn’t meant to be in the position of having to say anything else, and yet. “She got away, I’m sure of it. We all,” and there, I knew I was exaggerating, because I’d never talked to anyone at work about it, “we all of us kept an eye on the arrests, and she was never on the list.”

“That doesn’t mean,” someone said, grimly, from the other side of Angelina, “that she got away, not necessarily.” It’s one of the male redheads, there were four of them, all of them with such similar sharp, handsomeish features that I didn’t have a prayer of telling them apart. I wasn’t introduced to the men, mostly; I’m not sure why.

“They had a warning system going,” I said, decisively. “She and her husband, they had cousins in America, as well. She’d fly out there, Easter, Christmas, sometimes in November; I used to book for her.”

And I had told her, though I didn’t like her, between “Hitchens, the halfblood” and “Hitchens, the halfblood who knows her place”, to keep a pair of tickets booked just in case. Confunding your way onto a flight is quite unnecessary if you know your way around mileage programs, but it’s not a tool to ignore. And it’s easier, markedly easier, if you’ve valid tickets in hand, to be subtle about the spell, so that no one thinks you’re out of place.

“She got out,” I added, hoping I didn’t sound strange, hoping I didn’t sound anything more than defensive. “I know she did.”

The looks directed at and around me were looks that irritated me, but did not annoy. Poor, naive Sally… _that_ , I could handle. That girl, I can play with my eyes closed. Cold, flatly certain Sally is someone that only comes out on holiday. That should only come out then, for her safety.

Angelina looked mollified, a bit, but still upset. She pulled me aside, afterwards, to probe in detail, watching me as I stumbled through explanations, through justifications of Samuelson’s having neglected to tell her about her predecessor. Through repetitions of just how sure I was that Ms. Gilchrist was off safe in America, holidaying, perhaps, as opposed to dead in some ditch in the vague vicinity of Heathrow Airport.

I can’t do tears on command. At that moment, I fiercely wished I could, because I knew I was upset, and I don’t know how it looks to anyone, really, my being upset when I’m not crying. Generally, when I’m really upset, I pop into my back garden and break down, then reform, a cauldron. Helps focus the mind. Too much precise, destructive energy to not be a little relaxed, after wielding it.

Needless to say, I could hardly have asked to borrow a cauldron just then.

“Leave her alone, Angie,” the grim redhead bloke from earlier said, finally. “It’s hardly anything you can fix right now, is it?”

She fixed him with a look, the kind she pins down people with when they’re weaselling out of duties at work, but he weathered it, unblinking, and with that private, personal battle going, it was easier for me to make my escape.

Not easy though, as there were lots and lots of goodbyes. “Do come again,” the woman who must’ve been Molly Weasley said, brightly, even though I knew my only contribution to dinner was to bring up, and not quite lay to rest, a sore topic. “Always happy to have an extra pair of hands.”

She said _that_ because the first half of my escape was to head for the kitchen to bury myself in chores while hopefully sneakily buying some goodwill, some latitude to come over all droopy and let a headache drive me home.

“Oh,” I said, blinking. “I’d love to, I’m sure, only I don’t know I’ll always be able to. Weekends are usually, um, that’s when I er, I travel.”

And then I had to tell her all about it. Which slowed my departure, a bit, but was worth it. Because for a few moments, I got to talk, actually talk, to the woman who did for Bellatrix Lestrange. And I’ve always wanted to know, but would never ask, how it must have felt.

I did have some idea, though, by the time I finally left, by Floo, for which there was a short queue. Molly Weasley may be calculating, in that way most people are, just a little, for things that are important, but I’ll wager that that killing was not planned. Skill and rage and fierceness were involved, and luck, because you need luck, going after someone with more obvious magic, more obvious strength than you. But she did not plan it, not the way I do.

If I were in the mood to be sad, that thought, that discovery, would have made me so. But instead, as I whirled away through the flames, I felt focused. Jittery with it, my mind arrowing to the very precise thing I knew I must accomplish once I got home: searching out traces of Ms. Gilchrist, if there were any to be found.

* * *

It took me a month. A whole month, with no holiday, not the usual kind, at least. I was fit to climb walls by the time I stopped in on a very pregnant, rather blotchy Ms. Gilchrist, who was three towns away from where I thought she would be, but still in the same state, which I think is some kind of extra special stupidity.

She was afraid, then surprised, then annoyingly charmed to see me. I refused, somehow, to be introduced to anyone. I was the bearer of bad, but not entirely unexpected news; she’d assumed that she would have been replaced by now, and she managed, somehow, to get hired on at Winkle & Voss, who, if anything she said was true about the quality of American brooms, need her desperately.

“They’re being killed, just _killed_ , by Viking,” which is a brand I know, though not one that’s popular in our corner of the market. Too much emphasis on long-distance features and cloaking charms, and too little focus on pure speed and efficient output; not precisely a Nimbus competitor. “Though I fancy, with a little bit of guidance from yours truly… well, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. But I have landed alright, you must tell them all not to worry about me.”

Which they hadn’t, not so I as had noticed, with the exception of Angelina. But I wasn’t going to tell Ms. Gilchrist that, of course.

Ms. Gilchrist, who was still sharp enough that she somehow managed to bring our talk round to new formulations, and chivvy me into writing down the precise formula for the speed soak. I didn’t bother telling her it was trademarked, that the Nimbus barrister, a Sir Lionel something or other that lived only for swilling port and crushing the conniving, mostly European competition, would come down on us like an avenging angel if he knew what I was handing to her.

 _Severance,_ I thought, as I handed to her the two written formulas, the one she had asked for, as well as one she hadn’t. _Severance pay she’ll never get, most likely._ No one would like to remember her, for fear that she was dead and thus to be on their conscience. And you had to remember someone to have a fuss about how on earth to send them a cheque.

“Goodbye,” Ms. Gilchrist said, a little tearily. “Oh, Sally, you really shouldn’t have.” She’d seen, just then, the second formula, the one she hadn’t asked for because she’d thought I’d never give it.

“Use it sparingly,” I said, trying for a jaunty tone. I still didn’t like her, but I wanted the moment to end properly, on a nicely wistful high note.

She nodded, I nodded, I Apparated away.

Apparated most of the way to O’Hare airport, somewhere I had despised on first sight, suffering through it only because my conscience, or my arrogance, wouldn’t let me go on going in to work without knowing that my former boss was somewhere among the living, and happy enough to be getting on with.

I stopped, for a moment, in a town that was sleepy and snug, not because I heard anything, or for research. Just on a feeling that was half hunch, half sordid compulsion.

I walked the darkened streets for an hour, trying not to think of all the muggle men that slept peacefully in their beds, the fuckers that slept and didn’t, wouldn’t ever deserve their quiet, unbroken rest. “Not this month, Sal,” I told myself, over and over. “Not this month.”

But it would be the next, would have to. More carefully, now, now that ardent do-gooders like the stroppy Harry Potter Himself had battened on to the DMLE. With my luck, it wouldn’t even be him that caught me, him with the weird little power nimbus you could always feel within two feet of him, especially when he was scowling. No, it would be his slightly less scowly redhead sidekick, Auror-Trainee Weasley. Or, more embarrassingly, some Auror something-or-other that really looked up to Mr. Potter, y’know, and only ended up doing the legwork on my mysterious killings because of some stupid temporary disgrace.

* * *

I waited two months, then, because of that, though it hurt. Combed back, by borrowed use of the Greenwich Library pensieve, through my most recent lot of murders. Just checking, really, to see if anything had been left undone.

Nothing was. There was nothing out of place, nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to be concerned about.

So I went to Crete, with a surreptitious, horribly satisfying stop in Ulster. Two men; brothers. Both with a certain way about them, a fundamental arrogance that I nearly could not resist the urge to try and break in person. “It’s enough,” I told myself, after, “that they’re just fucking dead. It’s more than enough.”

It wasn’t, really. But I wanted not to have to stop, and Mum had always said, very seriously, that I had to be careful, if I wanted to live.

* * *

She knew, you see. Hard not to know, isn’t it, when it’s your own husband that’s the first. She’d been away at the time, at work when I did it, because he let her work, of course, since he couldn’t care less about supporting the two of us. He’d enough magic, just enough to order the both of us around, her to do what he liked, and me to shut up, to stay out of the way while they did what adults did.

I was ten, when I did it. Ten and his servant, whenever mum was at work, and still stupid enough to think– most of the time– that the shouting and the smacks I earned for spilling tea or burning toast were truly my fault. I had been hearing him muttering all summer, disgusted with the way our bills were piling up, with the way mum had dropped nearly a stone in weight.

He shouted something at me, over the toast, something about his being tired of us, and I suppose I disliked it. I’d like to say I thought something appropriately childish and chilling at the time, that I thought “well, _I’m_ tired of _you_ ” and then went about murdering him, but it didn’t happen like that.

What happened was that he said to fetch him a bloody drink, some bloody fucking alcohol, and so when I went into the kitchen, it seemed entirely natural to me to tip some rubbing alcohol in with the whiskey-and-water he usually had me make. Then, while he was retching, I took a run at him with the knife that I had brought to the table to try to shave away the burnt bits from his toast.

Then, when the knife wouldn’t go in, wouldn’t penetrate, his hands on my neck, my breath going, I screamed and I screamed and I made it go in, made the knife listen to me, until he was still.

Then, very sensibly, I took a shower, wiped down the bathroom, and left. Not sensibly, I went just down the road, and hid out in the hedgerow behind the Smaltings’. Police came, eventually. Mum was picking up an extra shift, so it was an age before she came down, and got properly hysterical until I pretended to wander by from having been on a long walk.

It was decided that it was some sort of gruesome accident. He had his hands around the hilt of the knife– not sure, to this day, how that had happened– and though the angle was probably wrong for someone stabbing themselves, and there was perhaps more mess than could be accounted for by his rolling about, the police couldn’t really make much of it. I didn’t know, until Hogwarts, just how lucky I was that he had not left a ghost.

Not that anyone besides me and maybe Mum would have been able to see it. But it was bad enough to have lived with the bastard, bad enough that any extra reminder of his presence would have done the both of us no good. I’d still felt strange back then, some mornings, wondering if I had somehow forgotten an order, an important one.

My seventh year, the year that Moody– not Moody, really– taught, was particularly instructive. _The Imperius,_ I remember scribbling, my handwriting shaky from excitement, because I had tried, had tested other spells and found that none of them quite felt the same as what my father had used to use.

It was awful, supremely awful, watching the silly, terrifying antics not-Moody forced my classmates through, and then having to stand up and let it happen to me. But, horrible as it was to feel so traitorously, happily numb again, I had borne it. I had wanted, no, _needed_ to feel what it was like. Because it’s easier, always has been easier, for me to duplicate a spell I have recently felt. I don’t know why, but I’m sure I’ll find, someday, a nicely scientific explanation. Even as weird as magic is, it’s still got some rules.

* * *

Magical rule number one: something always, always, goes wrong.

As in, I’d forgot someone. Not one of my names, my holiday men, but someone they had kept, a wizard, young and photogenic, because that was just the way my luck had decided to turn.

“I had been held,” he told the Prophet, perhaps after having sat for that picture of himself, his eyes wide, his pretty mouth trembling, his hands twisting as he looked up at you hopefully, barely daring to move. “I had been held for years. Years, and she stopped it. She stopped him.”

Thankfully, he hadn’t named or recognized me; he’d seen me for only some few, short moments, and anyway had not been allowed to go to Hogwarts. But he did describe me, calling me dark, and Dark, with coffee skin and blazing hair and eyes, and a cold voice with no mercy in it, no mercy for anyone but him. He called me, if you could believe it, a dark angel.

Clearly the Confundus hadn’t taken.

That I remembered him a little was just salt in my wounds. The ones I set free, the ones I let out of hell were nearly all the same to me, especially the magical ones. Ten years old, to my inner eye, and not enough mad to do the obvious for themselves, the necessary.

I’d talked to him soothingly, the way I did to everyone I freed. Got him clothes, got him cleaner, got him to stop hyperventilating and going off into hysterical giggles. Given him money and an address to head for, via the Knight bus. Since it had been during the war, I’d cautioned him about avoiding Knockturn. He’d looked at me like he wasn’t quite sure what I meant, but he’d nodded anyway, crisply.

Used to taking orders, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, in the little time I had.

I didn’t send the ones like him, the magical ones, to Mum, because I’d rather not worry about the Trace for the younger ones, or, say, someone turning her walls green during a panic attack. Generally I did St. Mungo’s charity arm, and hoped they would land all right. From the looks of this one, he’d landed more than all right, to my detriment.

I skimmed further, only to find that the blasted boy might be some sort of Bones on his mother’s cousin’s side. Tensing inside, I laid down the paper ( _THE BITTERSWEET REUNION_ , another article screamed, under a picture of an uncomfortable-looking Susan Bones and her supposed something-like-a-cousin) and tried, very hard, not to immediately incinerate anything.

“Augh,” Angelina said, in passing. “That awful tripe.”

“It is all rather far-fetched,” I said, weakly.

“Scammer, ten to one,” she said, sniffing at his beseeching picture. “I bet he’s not really a Bones at all.”

He was, of course. Distantly, yes, but the goblins’ meticulous blood testing and checking confirmed it. The headlines rejoiced, _Witch Weekly_ and the _Prophet_ competing to see who could be more bald, more heart wrenching, more ridiculous: SELWYN BONES SEEKS SAVIOR; SEX SLAVE BECOMES BONES’ BROTHER; SOLD, SHACKLED & SAVED - SELWYN’S STORY.

By the weekend, when the next Weasley dinner I could attend had rolled round, I was numb to fear, accustomed, mostly, to the sight of those carefully beseeching eyes assaulting me from every magazine cover. I was convinced, too, that no one was paying much mind to the story. That it was like any other one-week sensation, something on everyone’s lips for a few days, then utterly forgot by the end of the month.

* * *

“It’s not all bollocks,” Potter said, as grudgingly as might be expected, when Angelina demanded that _someone_ who knew what they were talking about weigh in. “And I know, I know, sex slaves? But he _was_ dropped off, sent off to Mungo’s, and when I went by to talk to, er, whatshername, and I brought it up, she said there’s a trend, there’s been a trend. People popping up, now and then, distressed, confused, sent by someone.”

“Always a woman, too,” Auror-Trainee Weasley said, musingly, half into his drink. When Granger tried to reach across and smack him, he waved her off, vehemently, explaining that what he had meant was that people never agree that consistently, there’s always a variation, it’s the stress that does it. “Which is why it’s funny– strange, I mean, that they’re all so sure what she looks like. Must have quite a presence, whoever she is.”

“And,” Potter said, a little louder, obviously getting into relaying the story, “after I heard, after we heard all that at Mungo’s, well, we had to check, didn’t we. And we didn’t find much, till we went to Sileby–”

Sileby, a town to which I had had cause to pay multiple visits, being the sort of quietish, lacking place that was sadly prone to having the suspicious teachers transferred to it.

“–and there’s been, oh, at least three different times, there, that it happened.” Four, by my count. “Not to any wizards, either, all of the deceased there were muggles.”

“The deceased?” Molly Weasley said, sounding distressed. “The _Prophet_ never said–”

“No,” Potter said. “They didn’t.” A grim, brief silence ensued, one that was like nails on the chalkboard within me. I wasn’t caught yet, logically I knew that, or I wouldn’t be sitting here looking sick with half my manager’s family, but. I was profoundly uncomfortable.

“That Bones bloke,” Auror Weasley said, “Bones or not, he’s clever. Never slips up, never says anything other than she ‘defeated’ the man, she ‘removed’ him, nothing like, um… And you know the way they keep at him for all the details.”

“I think it’s why he shares so much about everything else,” Granger said, rubbing a finger up and down the side of her glass. “To deflect.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Anyway,” Potter said, “she has been killing them. Not– torture, not anything awful, at least for the three we found. Accidents.”

“A hair dryer falling in the bath,” Weasley said, wryly. “Their car running into a post-office box. Heart attack, even. That sort of thing.”

“It’s, well, it’s thin enough that it _could_ be accidents, could all have been accidents, really,” Potter said, his tone now a little sheepish. “But like I said, it isn’t all made up.”

“Sally,” Angelina said, suddenly, from my right. “Sally, are you ok?”

“I’m,” I said, stiltedly, because I wasn’t. “It’s just– it’s so– hearing about it, that it’s any of it real–” I wasn’t sure if she could understand anything I was saying; my tone was too low, my voice too strangled. I swallowed hard, made an effort to get my chin up, sit up straight. “You needn’t, you needn’t stop talking, not on my account.”

From the fierce, quelling looks Molly Weasley was handing about, they were all to stop discussing it, or risk perishing on the spot. Which I wasn’t in the mood to make a joke of, not right then, not facing, suddenly, the thin edge of the ever-present threat of discovery.

 _Could you kill everyone?_ Mum had asked, after the second time I asked her why she was so all-fire sure it couldn’t work, me and my magic and my smarts and a horde of useless, worthless men. _Could you kill everyone that really, truly suspects you, before they think to say anything, before they can put you in danger?_

Mum is not like me. Decidedly not, but I get my practicality from her, and even upset, even worried to actual, possible death for me, she is, and has always been, sensible to a fault.

I, being thoroughly a teenager at the time, was dramatically decisive, bold and furious and boiling to be let loose. _I’d kill_ you _if I needed to,_ I’d said. And meant it, which she had seen, and had taken quite a while to forgive me for.

A forgiveness she had offered, out of the blue, when I popped in at the cafe near her house during the war, to check on her, to drop off supplies, and to tell her there might be one more person along that month. She’d looked up at me, and smiled, and without her saying anything, I’d somehow known I was forgiven for those thoughtless words of mine. Freely, unstintingly, mysteriously forgiven; a forgiveness I knew I did not deserve, and therefore could not, and did not trust.

“I’ll get the plates in,” I said, almost brightly, after the conversation had revolved around Ministry gossip for long enough that I judged I wouldn’t look completely avoidant. Still, as I began about the task, people gave me pitying looks, as if they’d any idea why I was fleeing.

The other half of my mind, the half that wasn’t focused on playing Sally and lugging along what felt like a cartload of dirty dishes on a decently smooth rolling _Locomotor_ charm, that other half was thinking it would be tough, but doable, to kill all the Weasley set. Firebomb, or perhaps something magical in nature; I didn’t _like_ Fiendfyre, but it was certainly the right tool for such a big task.

Wards would be an issue, though, keeping the targets from Apparating and all not usually ranking high on my serious holiday to-do list. _Imperio_ worked very well at sticking someone in place long enough to get the thing done, as well as rope, rope and netting that could easily be disposed of, after. For wizards, it was a carefully, continuously held _Imperio_ , a place to tie down, a carefully cauterized pair of cuts behind the knees…

Here, I wouldn’t have any of that immediately handy. Here, I’d have Harry fucking Potter to think of, Potter and his disgustingly persistent habit of never quite expiring. He’d kill me, probably just right as I’d killed the others, and wouldn’t _that_ be a frustrating end to all things, all the things I’d planned? All the places I’d yet to see.

Africa, I’d done a little bit there, working up from the bottom, so that wasn’t a complete loss. But I’d never quite worked out a trip to China, or Singapore, or Japan. I’d been planning a careful itinerary in that direction just when I’d become one of the halfbloods in the lab. It had hurt to give it up, but it would have hurt more to possibly be cut off, cut away from Mum in that way. I didn’t visit her terribly often, as we don’t really get on, but the inability to visit would have really fucked with me.

I have my patterns, you see, unfixed but largely similar. There was holidaying, and working, and socializing when Lisa Bennet, my interfering former dormmate from Ravenclaw, wouldn’t let me slide out of a meetup again. There was Mum, too, the quarterly Sunday tea. Her scones. Her stiff, anxious laughter. Her matter-of-fact listing of what next the people she’d been hosting at her B&B might need.

To give up any of it wouldn’t have killed me, but I disliked it, I more than disliked the idea of it, I despised it. _My life,_ I thought, as I spun dishes dry. _It’s my life._

But it occurred to me that I could make another one, if pushed. If it was that or stop killing. If it was that, or be caught.

For now, though, until the bloody mystery was over– “the Sex Slave Killer?” Granger said, her voice faint and amused, filtering thinly through the closed back door. “Ron, you _know_ that’s wrong, you know she’s not going round doing in the actual…”

“You’ve got to admit,” Ron said. Auror Weasley rather, his tone shaky with held-back laughter. “You’ve got to admit, Hermione, ‘Sex Enslaver Killer’ doesn’t scan.”

“Rephrase that, Weasley,” Potter said, his voice deliberately pompous, his accent aping someone else’s, someone they all none of them liked. “ _Tragic_ phrasing, that.” And they all laughed, at least until I came out through the back door, whereupon they swallowed their laughs and looked a bit guilty. “Er, sorry, Sally. Didn’t think we were being that loud.”

“It’s all right,” I somehow managed to say. “Not going to combust if I hear a joke.” But the tone, I immediately saw, from looking at their expressions, was completely wrong. I’d sounded more spitefully blithe than weakly so, and my natural expression has always made me look a little dour, so they’d very naturally assumed that I was angry.

 _Fix it,_ Mum’s no-nonsense tone said in my head, because if I was angry, if I was always coming off as angry, it would tarnish the sad, mild cover I had so carefully assumed.

“Look,” I said, closing my eyes, touching my hair with a slightly shaking hand, “it really is all right. You weren’t to know I was still in there, or that I get a bit, erm.” _Weak,_ I hoped they’d all fill in, mentally, as I opened my eyes again. _Cowardly._ And I forced a brief smile to go with it. “So it’s really all right.”

“Even so,” Granger said, because she was obviously the polite one. And then she nudged Auror Ron Weasley hard, in the side, because her politeness only went so far. “Even so, we really shouldn’t have been that loud.”

“Yeah,” Weasley said, immediately, his tone more sincere than you might have expected of someone being nudged along. “Sorry, about that.”

I smiled again in a quick grimace, hoping to put this awful moment to bed. “No harm done, no worries. Could you tell Molly that I’m…? Only I’ve got an, erm, I’ve got some work.”

“Angelina making you work on a weekend?” Potter said, gallantly. “Should we go drag her out, make her take it back?”

“No, no,” I said immediately. “No, it’s my project, just a bit of a tweak. Few tweaks to test, for the Speedwell.”

I’d forgot that Granger was the only one of them whose eyes would reliably glaze over at the mention of broom testing. Potter and Weasley, though, they delayed my planned departure by an excruciating quarter-hour, asking question after delighted question, calling in Ginny Weasley because she just _had_ to hear about it too, until what felt like half the dinner party had cornered me by the back door to the garden, listening avidly to my predictions of what features would end up in the final model.

Angelina, who I’d hoped would put a stop to it, on account of trade secret violations or her wanting to be the one to tell the story, simply came along and listened in, waving off attempts to bring her in by saying she’d not been at Nimbus even half as long as I had. Which was regrettably, quite true.

“I really do have to get on,” I said, again and again, to make my escape. “Mr. Samuelson and them would have my head if they knew I was jawing on like this; you really shouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Silence to the death!” That was Ginny Weasley, who had made me promise to send her some industrial-strength Stability Stripper before she went back to training with the Harpies. _Don’t have a whole month to spend watching it brew,_ she’d said, _and the commercial stuff they give us is such utter shit, you do three soaks and all the useless navigation charms are barely eroded…_ “And remember, I don’t mean vials, Hitchens, I’ll need at least a whole crate!”

“She heard you the first time, you awful leech,” Potter said, in such a tone that you knew they’d be off shagging as soon as they could find a private space, and then the roar of the Floo took me away from them, and made them all safe.

* * *


	2. rose red crush

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I didn't think it'd actually been a couple weeks since I last posted this; updating now, and the next chapter should follow on in a week.

I decided to take another month off from holidaying, much as I disliked it. Much as I’d already had two visits planned, two visits I’d been looking very much forward to. Just to soothe myself, I made sure to walk by the flat and the house of my targets, to subtly probe their units in the hope of finding anything that needed immediate action.

If I’d found a person, one of the hidden, shackled, terrified sort, I’d have got them out and put an aversion on the dwelling, or perhaps waited home and wiped the man’s memory as completely and thoroughly as I could. I’d always had that option, if I wanted to let them live, but it had always felt to me like half measures.

And, too, like leaving the job unfinished. I wasn’t completely up to date on the relevant psychology of these sorts, and my half-hearted foray into memory replacement and other personality-affecting spells wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to count on when lives could be at stake. I didn’t want to chance walking away and perhaps returning someday to find that either of my targets had built a new life and still managed to fall into old, accustomed ways. It was easier, and much more efficient, to just kill them once and be done.

Finally, two hours of prowling and charming later, I realized I was stalling, hoping to encounter someone and find myself forced to precipitate action, so I Apparated back to my hotel room. Forced myself to sleep, then forced myself to check out as planned. Then forced myself onto the flight home, feeling sullen and stupid for being so sullen, when the treat I denied myself today might be what kept me able to grasp more treats tomorrow.

* * *

My temper was short for the rest of the month. Luckily, that coincided with the final, no-really-this-is-it deadline for submission of the final prototype of the Speedwell to the factory. It was the conclusion of Angelina’s first big project, and it did not go very swimmingly.

It was as if the post-war relief and camaraderie had suddenly all run out, and run out screaming. No shouting in the office, that was a general Nimbus rule, but there were raised voices, slammed doors and whispered, furious conversations. The reference model we liked best was warping; it was something in the wood or something in the treating, or the pixies had got in and we would have to de-infest our workstations and make a new set of brooms, and anyway it was a stressful, horrid time.

Finally– it was both the wood and the treating, and thankfully not the pixies– the re-finished brooms hummed along in the air beneath Roberts and Chang, our long-suffering test flyers. The company clapped, the testers and broom scientists very enthusiastically, the factory workers doing so more reluctantly. It was now their turn to take the reference models and designs and make the test run, and then, only after further testing, would there be designated a Speedwell production line, with overtime and bonuses for those co-opted for the first hellish six-month run.

My work, though, my time-sensitive work was done for the moment, and I could trudge back up to my desk and mope along through experiments with no one standing over me asking when they’d be done.

Two blissfully mopey days passed. Then, on the third day, the investor walk-through began, for just after a new line was off running through the factory was always the prime time to lead investors through our department. To have them take a turn on the polished reference model, and marvel at us all bent over our stations, taking measurements and scribbling notes and looking properly industrious, but not also crying with vexation or perhaps raging quietly under our breaths that this was the last time we bought birch from that swine Moggleby, mark our words.

I paid the investors about as much attention as they paid me, which wasn’t very much. Nods, politely returned nods, and the occasional explanation. It was midway through one of these unavoidable conversations that I saw him in the distance, looking out over the testing floor from the deliberately scenic height of the entrance: Selwyn Bones, former sex slave, new minted millionaire heir and future investor in Nimbus Ltd.

I didn’t lose my marbles. Somehow, I even only managed a skip, a brief, explainable pause in the explanation I was making. One easily explained by the fact that, in person, Selwyn Bones was extremely prepossessing.

I wasn’t the only one affected, thankfully; I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that Angelina was staring up at him, too. ‘Stunning’ was the wrong word for the way he looked, while decked out in those sleek, quietly expensive robes. More than that, he seemed relaxed and in good health, his overall appearance so polished that I doubted, for one brief moment, that I had ever, ever seen him anywhere else.

Even cringing and crazy-eyed and underfed and stumbling along behind me in the dark, he had looked good enough that I had been very pointed about warning him to stay out of Knockturn. Blonde, in that soft golden way that caught the eye; gaunt, then, but not now, and with a face, and a mouth, and eyes that surely belonged to some improbable Tolkien elf… Well. Any one of Knockturn’s whorehouses would have swallowed a man like him up without so much as a hello. The worst of them wouldn’t have let him back out, either, not if he weren’t under an Imperius.

“Oh, hello,” he called out, smoothly, his tone just that polite amount of embarrassed, as if he were used, but not happy to be used to everyone in a room suddenly goggling up at him. “Don’t mind me; just here for the tour, carry on.”

An order everyone, variously flushing (Violet Brocklehurst) or scowling (tester Cho Chang, on hand to make sure no rich idiots broke their necks on a Speedwell), turned around and hurried to obey. “Veela blood,” my investor, a Mrs Cadding, said to me, sniffily, sotto voce. “Quite obviously so, don’t you think?”

“I couldn’t possibly speculate, ma’am,” I said, just this side of politely. “Did you want to hear more about the new soaker?” As predicted, she did, and was so engrossed in my carefully understandable explanation that she entirely forgot to give Selwyn Bones the gimlet eye as Angelina chauffeured him past my station.

It wasn’t veela blood, either, not so much that it was obvious. A previous ancestor, perhaps, had strayed. But they had strayed also, repeatedly, to other pretty blondes, to give their descendant that unmistakable gilding, and then they had at some point married into the Bones, who had contributed height and heft and presence, and something of a firmness about the mouth, something that had made him and Susan Bones look vaguely related.

He was charming to everyone he spoke to, and charming at a distance to those he did not; he was everything I’d have expected, in fact, of one of the untouchable, seedy set, except that there was that in his warm hazel eyes that said he somehow genuinely meant it, genuinely meant to make you comfortable and just a little happy for having had his eye on you.

He did not look even once in my direction, not in the way his entrance had made me imagine that he might. I was one of the distance lot; I was a nod and a smile exchanged, and then nothing.

I very much disliked the way it made me feel.

After, once Selwyn Bones and Mrs. Cadding and all the other investors were gone, Angelina came over to my desk, to plunk herself down and exchange a long, speaking look with Chang, who hurried over in the next moment, trailed by Roberts and Brocklehurst, who then roped in a still-fuming Andy Wilson, and the perpetually mildly smiling Sam Sloper.

“He is signing on, isn’t he?” Brocklehurst burst out, her tone almost pathetically hopeful. “Oh, think of all the press, the instant editorials…”

“No pictures of him on the broom, though,” Chang said, mercilessly. “Gosh, that was awkward.”

“A disaster,” Wilson pronounced, his tone tight with aggravation. “You’d think Samuelson, or Tyling or whoever roped the poor bastard in would have thought to ask if he’d ever been on a fucking broom.” Wilson, a test flier himself on tight days, had been forced to ask, and then forced, awkwardly, to teach, to someone who looked like the last thing they wanted was to have their feet leave the ground with the Speedwell’s patented jaunty swoop. “I’d not invest, myself, if I’d been humiliated like that on a fucking walk-through.”

“He’ll invest,” Angelina said, soothingly. “He didn’t look the least worried about what we might think, not to me.” Unmentioned was the fact that half the testing floor had held their breaths as Bones mounted, as he wobbled through his first flight, and had visibly had to restrain themselves from polite cheers, afterwards. “All I wonder, really, is why us.”

“Mrs. Samuelson’s still getting on at Gringotts, isn’t she?” Brocklehurst said. “Probably, she had his account man steer him our way. They’re still rowing, I hear, with Spudmore, over the interest on that whacking loan they took for manufacture.”

“In any case,” Angelina said, wryly, “for the sake of our productivity, I hope he stays well away from the lines for a few months, when he does invest.”

“Oh, Samuelson’s no fool,” Brocklehurst said, waving airily; much as she’d only come on last year, she liked to play the knowing older woman, as if her admittedly harrowing year of experience at a Comet subsidiary was all the education she required in the field. “He’ll keep him sweet with new models, and private trials, and never even think of letting him come down here.”

* * *

As it happened, the rigorous protection Brocklehurst had predicted would come into play was not at all required. Despite the wild furore of the papers over the dry announcement on the part of Nimbus Ltd. that a Mr. Selwyn Bones was on their yearly buy-in list, Bones did not request to show so much as a hair at the offices, or indeed at the factory. Not entirely surprising, considering the pack of photographers that camped the walk and were always looking to come in to ask for a drink or wonder if they might use the loo, but very obviously doing so to get a better look in at whoever might have come in.

Angelina, after the first day or so of those unceasing requests, pressed her lips together and rolled up her sleeves, and then laid a cast-iron Notice-Me-Not on the threshold of the entrance to our floor. The photographers stayed out, after that, and were down to one hopeful squatter in a week, the rest of them off chasing some less camera-shy scandal.

“It’s hardly as bad as what Harry has to deal with,” Angelina was heard to mutter. “Still, it’s bad enough.”

“If I were Mr. Bones, I wouldn’t come by either,” Brocklehurst said, her tone understanding, her expression wistful. “Not for all the galleons in the world.”

The longer that Bones avoided visiting Nimbus, the more the general hope became that he would see fit to brave the madding crowd to come by Nimbus’ annual charity ball, which was coming up shortly. Invitations had just been sent out, and the gossip was that Bones had given the usual noncommittal response: ‘charmed, honoured to be invited, would be pleased to attend, etc’.

That was the standard thing most people sent in response to our company’s invites, so the hope that Bones would be there did not fade. However, as the day of the ball approached, the anxious delight in speculation over his attendance gave way to the more prosaic concerns of people preparing to attend something that was half formal company function, and half regular social landmark.

That last was mostly due to the timing of the ball every year; it was always held in the summer, smack dab in the low point of the season, when most people had returned from their summer trips, and were sitting around waiting for the real ball-going season to pick up after Hogwarts reopened. That fortuitous timing, along with the various flashy, broom-related prizes for the charity auction and the social reach of Nimbus Ltd’s investors and the ball’s organizers ensured that the ball was always thoroughly attended. Even in the midst of the quiet misery that had been the event season last year, the ballroom had been packed to the gills.

Attendance was mandatory for all Nimbus employees; partnered attendance was not. It was this helpful fact that had so far preserved the egos, and perhaps even the lives of a handful of idiot wizards and witches that either thought that ‘the shy one’, as I was known outside of testing, would be an easy date, an easy lay, or at least someone to stand up with so they weren’t the only one going alone.

This year, I was careful to be rather more than usually cheerful to be going alone, especially in Angelina’s vicinity. Which, though it would not necessarily preserve me from awkward introductions to really good friends when we were finally at the ball, _would_ do the job against her trying to partner me up previous to the event.

* * *

Initially, the ball seemed to be shaping up to be another pleasantly boring occasion. There was no trouble, not with my dress robes (a simple, if slightly spartan set in navy blue), or my dancing (the bare minimum, including one pleasant turn with Sam Sloper, who, as always, spoke little, and kept his hands to himself), and not even, it must be said, with the little awkwardness that came about from Harry Potter trotting up and calling me Sally.

“Sally!” he said, so brightly that I was sure half the ballroom heard it, despite the awful din. “You never showed for dinner, last Sunday. How’ve you been?”

“Oh,” I said, flushing, wishing I could put my hands about his throat, “I thought Molly’d have told you, I was in Belgium that day.”

“Yeah, well, I’m supposed to say, from Ginny, that she’ll need another box if the lab can spare it. I’d swear she and the others were drinking it, if I didn’t know how it smelled– is that Neville? Oh, I hate to run, I know I probably interrupted–”

“Oh, it’s fine,” I said, hastily, desperate to have him away. “Go, go… go after him.”

“Cheers,” Potter said, with a brief, apologetic nod, directed vaguely at me and Cho Chang, who made a brief face at him and was rewarded with a sheepish smile. Then he was off piling into the crowd, heading straight for the towering, distant form of Neville Longbottom.

“You missed dinner?” Brocklehurst said, the moment he was gone. “ _You_ missed dinner with Harry Potter?”

“The Weasleys have a big thing about Sunday dinner,” Chang interjected, kindly, though she certainly needn’t have. “That’s what he was talking about, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, hating the sudden, pitying cast to the stares, even though it was the exact reaction I wanted. “Angelina took me once, a few months ago, and I drop by every now and then.”

“Bit of a crush, isn’t it?” Chang said, nodding sagely. “Not that I’ve gone, I just know, you know. _All_ the Weasleys, together, it’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “They’re very nice, though.”

_Probably,_ Violet Brocklehurst was clearly thinking, _because they feel sorry for her, the poor dear._ But that, at least, I could deal with, coming from her. She’d only ever needed a little nudge to see me as poor Sally, and I couldn’t quite help but feel grateful to her over it, especially since she was the office gossip, and thus set the general tone for how each of us was perceived.

That, unfortunately, was merely the prelude toward the real disaster. Which visited me in the alarmingly attractive person of Selwyn Bones, who, some moments after the Potter Event, walked up to our circle of not-presently-dancing Nimbus employees, and plucked me forth with a mere smile and a suggestion that Angelina had asked him to find me.

“Er,” I said, eloquently, because this really was too much, too much outwardly desirable male attention, and I vehemently disliked the thought of what it might mean. I am well endowed, always have been, but severely minimizing bras and high necklines and a tired, solemn expression have usually kept people from noticing me. Harry Potter, him I could excuse, explain as a previous acquaintance, as someone, bluntly, on an errand from his girlfriend. Selwyn Bones, on the other hand…

“Come along,” he said, breezily, extending his arm toward me, and since I could not presently see Angelina, and could thus not refuse the polite condescension of such a famous new investor, I smiled, awkwardly, and went along, arm in arm with the man I had saved, the man that might so disastrously discover me.

We moved in silence, for the first part of the journey. It was too loud, too crowded not to. I began to feel that this might, _might_ just be what he’d said it was: a favor for Angelina, who really did have the knack for getting even her polite half-suggestions carried out as if they were orders.

Then, as we moved through a slightly less packed section of the ballroom floor, Mr. Bones leaned in toward me, not too closely, and said: “Were you in the same year, at Hogwarts, as Ms. Johnson?”

Which I had to stop at, for a second, just mentally stop, because that was somehow not the thing I’d been expecting him to say. As my mouth worked, as I flushed, I realized that I had been expecting something far more dramatic. An _‘I know you,’_ or _‘I remember you’_ or an _‘I knew we’d meet again’._

Instead, he was asking after Angelina. Asking after her by her maiden name, which she still went by at Nimbus, half because that was how she’d been hired, and half because according to her, from the way things generally went in her relationship with her surly husband, he was far more a Mr. Johnson than she’d ever be a Mrs. Weasley. And besides, Mrs. Weasley was his mother, Molly, and would always be, in both their heads, so really–

I had to answer. “Erm,” I said, wishing desperately that I’d any idea where this fishing expedition was going. Or rather, any idea that it _wasn’t_ going where I thought it was. “She was in my year, but in Gryffindor, and on the Quidditch team, so we never did talk much, back then. Though I’d say she’s a cracking boss now.” Ugh, now I sounded like a sycophant. “Did she ask after me for anything in particular? Or is it–”

“No,” Bones said, nearly as abruptly as I might have, in his position, flooded with that much. “No, well, she didn’t ask for you, precisely, so much as wonder if… Actually, isn’t that her, over by the punch?”

It was.

From the way Bones was looking back and forth between a laughing Angelina and myself, he was not at all confident about what it was he was nerving up to do. “Onward, then,” he muttered, and steered me right up to the punch bowl, where Angelina was giggling still, tickled by whatever acerbic nonsense her husband had been saying.

Oh, yes, she was with her husband. Standing close enough to him, too, that anyone would have been able to tell they were together. Anyone, perhaps, save for poor Mr. Bones. Who bowed with a flourish, and presented me, much as if he’d crossed the seven seas to obtain my person, and then wrestled my mother, the eighth sea, for the privilege of bringing me forth. And then also perhaps run afoul of customs on the return trip, and was so very desperately hoping he’d got the right girl, and that everyone would applaud him for it, that you felt a little sick, watching him.

“Sally, hi,” Angelina said, not at all like someone who’d been so particularly wanting to see me that she’d send to the end of the world for a champion to bring me back. “You clean up well; you’re looking very nice.”

“I do dress properly on occasion,” I said, tartly, because I’d already seen this sort of conversation play out between Brocklehurst and Wilson just a bit earlier, and Brocklehurst’s cheeky response had seemed to go over well. “Somehow or another.”

“It’s quite a crush, isn’t it, Mr. Bones?” Angelina said, then, favouring him with a friendly smile, effortlessly including him in our meaningless small talk, and things went on in that excruciating vein for quite some time. Until the key, mortifying question was asked: “So, what brings you two over here, arm in arm?”

“Er,” I said, because I couldn’t say it was the punch, as it was only just tolerable, and because we neither of us had bothered to try and have any more yet. “Not much, really, just erm, drifting,” I managed to say. Then added, hastily: “We were talking,” we weren’t, “a little bit about the, ah, the St. Mungo’s, er, their own charity do? And how, well, it’s never so well-attended as this.”

Not the most satisfying lie, to be sure, but at least one that would distract from Bones’ slight, almost terrifyingly fetching flush. Though not in quite the way I would’ve liked; Angelina was looking back and forth between the two of us now, her gaze speculative, and I was sure I would dislike her eventual conclusion almost as much as Bones did.

“Not much interest,” her Weasley said, just loudly enough to be heard over the increasing din, “in charity balls for sick people, I’m thinking. People would much rather bid on brooms.”

“Well yes, exactly,” I said, surprised, just a little, by how cynical his tone was. “Really, I wouldn’t bother coming if it weren’t mandatory for everyone at Nimbus.” Not true, since big, reliably packed balls made quite an excellent alibi; last year, I’d come to the Nimbus do and made sure to be seen directly before and after knocking off one of my wizards. There’d been no investigation, what with everything else that was happening, but if there had been, half my co-workers would have sworn I was there the whole evening.

“Do you mean to say you go to _more_ of these things?” was Weasley’s wide-eyed, half-laughing response. “I’d never have taken you as one for the society season.”

“I don’t do very many balls,” I said, trying not to sound too defensive. “Mostly I do the, er, the small soirées, the ones with invited speakers. There’s quite a few people who won’t publish anything, you know, but they’ll stop in with relatives and give the occasional talk on antivenins or whatnot.”

“Aha,” Weasley said, waggling his eyebrows. “The ulterior motive; that makes far more sense. Now, Sally, I’m curious, in all these talks, have you ever come across anything on adapting the triple-boiling method for use on a commercial scale?”

“George, for goodness’ sake.”

“Oh, Angie, this isn’t at all– this is purely from one potions aficionado to another!” Had Professor Snape not already expired, hearing George Weasley pronounce himself a potions aficionado in that injured, pointedly self-righteous tone would surely have toppled him into an early grave. “I’m only asking her about a theory.”

“‘Theory,’ he says,” Angelina said, rolling her eyes. “As if I haven’t been warning him off from testing the setup for it all month.”

“She’s right, you know,” I couldn’t help but chime in, half because it would suit my character, and half because I couldn’t bear to let anyone go on thinking it was safe to experiment when it manifestly wasn’t. “There’s a reason factories stick to the double-boil only. Isolation don’t always hold up on a large scale, and when one vat goes, it triggers the others. You can lose half your lines that way.”

“But the– the rise in the purity of the final yield…”

“Cancelled out, I should think, by the batches you’d lose to explosions,” Angelina said, repressively. “Can we talk about literally anything else? The weather? Those awful feathered cloaks that just came into fashion?”

“I thought you liked hearing me talk about business efficiencies,” Weasley murmured, with a sly glance in her direction, one that I’d have expected her to roll her eyes at again, instead of looking at him and forgetting, quite obviously, that either me or Selwyn Bones existed.

“So,” she finally said, blinking a little. “Feathers on cloaks it is.” And a brief, spirited conversation was had on the subject, with Weasley again claiming the spotlight, insisting that he had _too_ seen someone on Diagon that had sported a giant raven’s head along with giant black and orange feathers along their cloak hem.

* * *

It was easier, in the wake of that silly argument, to bow out of the conversation while dragging Mr. Bones off with me. I say dragging, though it didn’t really need to come to that; Weasley’s loud exaggerations had drawn a little bit of a crowd by then, mostly old Hogwarts friends, and Angelina was looking at him very warmly. I needed only to exert the smallest pressure on Bones’ arm to encourage him to drift off with me, and, when he came along, it was easy enough to steer us off toward one of the exits that led out into the gardens that clung to the outside of this half of the ballroom.

“She’s married,” was the first thing I said to him, once we were out of the crush and a little way into the ferns. “She doesn’t go by Weasley, professionally, so it’s easy to miss.”

Silence was all I got in response, a thoroughly mortified, red-cheeked silence. Then, as we slowed beneath an arch bedecked with climbing roses: “I had begun to gather that, but thanks. Thank you.”

Then, almost compulsively: “I wasn’t– I suppose it looked like I was–”

“It’s all right,” I said, stiffly, wondering how I’d got myself in the position of having to comfort him over, what, being far too blinded by hope to imagine that his supposed saviour might prove thoroughly attached to someone else? “Probably she thinks you’re after me, if that’s any consolation.” Though I wouldn’t answer for what her sharp-eyed husband might have thought was happening; it would explain why he’d been playing to her so fervently for the latter half of our conversation. “If you’d rather be alone–”

“Don’t _leave_ ,” Bones said, hurriedly. Then, after glancing down at me, he forced on a beseeching smile that was all the more attractive for being just a little bit strained. “Walk me back in, in a moment?”

“Yeah, sure,” I muttered, flushing stupidly. I told myself to belt up, to do better than the usual sorts he batted his eyes at, to be polite and proper and completely unmoved by the feeling of standing in a darkened corner of the garden with him, his warm, slightly calloused hand trapping mine in the crook of his elbow. “Just let me know when.”

His hand tightened over mine, and he let out a short, bitter laugh that scraped at me somehow. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s exactly it.”

“Mr. Bones…”

“I thought it’d be easier,” he said, his voice quiet and flat, “you know, when I found her. And now that I might have, I don’t– I don’t know what to do.”

I didn’t know what to do, either. “Therapy?” I said, weakly, because I knew that the sort of girl I was playing wouldn’t even dream of voicing her disbelief of what he was claiming; it wouldn’t be at all polite. “I hear the St. Mungo’s program isn’t too bad.” From the way he was staring down at me, politely unspoken disbelief had indeed been the right choice. “Or if you’d feel better, you know, talking to a muggle therapist–”

“It’s therapy enough,” he said, lowly, “knowing that he’s dead.” And then I really couldn’t say anything, because I suddenly recalled that he was one of those that had asked– begged, really, to see the corpse. “Though I’d thank you not to mention that, to anyone.”

“Why?” I said, unable to help myself, struck by a sudden ugly thought. “They didn’t, the Aurors didn’t suspect _you_?”

The way he smiled should probably have chilled me. “They didn’t say they did,” he said, softly. “No wand, no education, not that much natural talent. It’d have been a miracle, really, if I’d done for him.”

“I’m glad someone did,” I said, decisively, but not _too_ decisively. Much as it piqued my pride, I did want him to come away from this foolish encounter thinking of me the way everyone else did. Poor, naive, simple, sheltered Sally.

Probably, that slight inner distraction was why I ignored the way he had turned a little toward me, the way he was looking down at me, his gaze calculating. That meant that when he bent in toward me, I had only enough time to register that he was going to kiss me a brief moment before his lips met my cheek. He put his mouth to mine almost immediately after, his lips parted, his tongue teasing me, even as his free arm wound tightly around my waist, bringing me against him.

“Wait,” I moaned, half in character, half panicking at the thought of him wanting… that. “Wait, I don’t…”

“Please,” he said, his breath hot against my mouth. “I need– I can’t sleep properly without it. I’m good, too, I’ll make it so good. Please.”

_Liar,_ I thought. The words he used, the soft-voiced, almost cringing excuse he made for himself said one thing, while the increasing tension of his grip on my wrist said another. He wanted more than just satisfaction; I’d wager a galleon that the moment we were in private, he would do much worse than hold me just a bit too tightly. And who knew how far he’d go, once I was utterly alone with him, utterly in his power.

“I don’t know,” I said, despite the fact that I did know, and should have been extricating myself with alacrity. His hands roamed, gently squeezing my breasts, and I grew weak-kneed and stupidly wet, imagining– imagining what had always been my usual, a man, taller and heavier and stronger than me, his hands soft and careful until we were alone, and I couldn’t get away from him. “Don’t…”

“You don’t like it?”

“I mean, I mean we can’t, not out here.” I knew what I was doing, sounding that weak, that uncertain, while both his hands cupped and kneaded my arse cheeks through the smooth fabric of my robes. “Anyone could come by.”

He pulled me close, his hands still on my arse, until I could clearly feel the heat of his erection against my stomach. “Yours or mine?”

“Mine,” I said. “Is that alright? Shall we Floo, or should I, erm…?”

Even if I hadn’t been looking up at him, I would have been able to tell that he smiled. There was something in the way his body shifted against me, something in the way he leaned forward just a touch. “Take me to your bedroom,” he said, his voice low and warm, his tone one of gentle, indisputable command. “Take me there right now.”

Guiltily, I mentally went over my Ds, all while struggling to convince myself that the flat, hungry expression in his hazel eyes didn’t necessarily mean that this would all go tits up, forcing me to either avoid him henceforth, or perhaps even pencil him in for my next holiday.

_It’ll be fine,_ I told myself, just before I Apparated us both. _He’ll give you a good, hard fuck, and toddle off home unharmed in the morning, see if he won’t._

Still, I expected the opposite. Though of course it didn’t stop me from shivering against him as he stroked and squeezed my tits again. Guiltily, I yielded to his hot kisses, letting him drag me down with him onto my narrow bed.

“Suck me,” he said, then, his tone hard. “Take it all.”

It was difficult, but I managed, revelling in the way he watched me do it, his occasional thrusts the only indication of his fevered interest in the proceedings. He didn’t deign to touch my head. He leaked in my mouth, copiously, but when I swallowed around him, it barely occasioned more than a slight hitch in his breath.

My eyes teared up. I choked myself on him, feeling a warm curl of satisfaction when that made him breathe out, hard, the exhalation coming through clenched teeth. “Whore.”

I moaned in response, and he thrust up again, making me choke and gag around him. Then he pulled out abruptly, leaving me coughing, gasping for breath. “On your knees.”

“I,” I said, hoarsely, “I don’t–”

“Didn’t ask your fucking opinion. Do it.”

I shook before him, half yearning to be able to obey without question, and half convinced that this was probably the best moment to feel out just how seriously he was taking this– this– I couldn’t say ‘performance’, because it just wasn’t one. Probably he’d have talked a lot more about how much of a slut I was, letting some stranger into my bed just because he’d asked, if he meant this whole thing as a showcase of his ability to play the hard case, rather than his just _being_ one.

“Please,” I whispered, “please not on my knees. I know it’s– I know I haven’t the right to ask, but I want to see your face, while you, erm. Please?”

There was something wrong with me for enjoying this, for savouring even this moment. Technically, it could still go balls-up when he got going at me– rough sex with someone you didn’t know very well was the opposite of foolproof, and on the other times I’d engaged in it, there’d been the occasional ‘fuck, that really hurts, could you stop’ or even ‘I think I’ve twisted something, hold on’. And he could prove himself the villain then, by ignoring me flat out and going on.

But this moment still felt pivotal, still felt significant; there was something I very much liked about lying there and gazing up at him pleadingly, desperately hoping for him to take pity on me.

Bones sighed, then smiled, coldly, and advanced on me. “You’ll see me,” he said, lowly. “You’ll look at me the whole time I have my cock in you, or you’ll be sorry.”

I couldn’t help but lick my lips.

He took me hard, so hard my teeth rattled, and I couldn’t– if it had been real, I didn’t know if I could have caught my breath to cast anything to stop him. He was hot and thick and nearly too big for me to take in easily, even as wet as I was. It hurt. It hurt so nicely.

I was crying by the end, and I could tell he liked it because he slowed just a little, to watch me sobbing, his cock swelling inside me. He bent in, his full weight crushing me, and licked a hot stripe down my cheek, lapping up my tears, and I came soon after, unable to bear it. “Whore,” he whispered, and that was almost enough to take me over the edge again, almost enough but not quite.

I needed him to give it to me, to fuck me all the way there again, just like this, each stroke slamming my shivering, helpless body into the mattress, each thrust stimulating the aching entrance of my slick, sore cunt. I needed him to use me, to let out sordid, eager grunts and groans as he took what he wanted.

He came with nearly no warning, his eyes falling half-closed, his body stiffening over mine. He rocked his hips forward, breathing heavily as he pumped me full of his come, letting out one last grunt of satisfaction.

“Please,” I said, shuddering. “I’m– I’m still–”

“’Course you are,” he said, lowly, “you nasty slut.” He thrust again, then shifted, his breath hot on my face as he worked his fingers between us, skimming down over the swell of my belly, and then… “There you are.”

He got his other hand between us. Forced a finger into me beside his softening cock, and very soon I was arching under him, my greedy moans muffled against his bare shoulder. Afterwards, after he pulled out and rolled off me, he stuck his fingers into me, pinned my hands above my head and began to frig me off again.

“Wait,” I heard myself gasp. “I don’t– you don’t need–” That he ignored my pathetic attempt at declining his vigorous attentions only made me feel each stroke of his fingers more strongly. “Oh, oh fuck, fuck, _fuck_ …”

He didn’t let me go until after I’d gone limp. “Alright?”

“Yeah,” I breathed, “that’s definitely done it, thank you.” And then I tried not to watch too obviously as he licked his fingers clean, absently, I thought at first, till I realized that he was watching me through lowered lashes, smiling a little at my expense. “Well, you were right. It was very good.”

Now he was definitely smiling down at me, his gaze still flat, his expression unreadable. “As you know,” he said, scooting backwards to the edge of the bed, “I wasn’t kept for my scintillating conversation.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. With a man like, say, George Weasley, I could assume that that last remark was just a particularly dark, bitter sort of joke; with Mr. Bones, I wasn’t sure what to assume. It now occurred to me that, in the heat of the conversation we’d struck up with Angelina and her Weasley, I had barely heard Bones say anything at all. Not a comfortable thought, was it, thinking that his offhand, self-mocking statement might actually be true. “Sorry,” I said carefully, my eyes downcast. “Didn’t mean to be– I mean, I didn’t mean to remind you of, of anything.”

“It was a bad joke on my part,” was the flat, measured response. “There’s no need to apologize over it.”

“Right,” I said, even more awkwardly, all while thinking, _definitely not fucking_ you _again._ “D’you, erm, want a shower? Some tea or something?”

He didn’t. He refused all my polite, handwringing offers of some form of hospitality; he took out his wand, a short, solid thing made of dark wood, and spelled himself to freshness with the joyful eagerness of someone unused to being able to always, always be clean, and then he Apparated away with nothing more than a curt nod and a mutter about it having been a good time.

“Bollocks it was,” I said, to the empty air in front of my tiny dressing table, the air Selwyn Bones had just all too eagerly vacated. “Bet he won’t even remember my bloody name.”

Which hurt a bit to think of, but not so much as I’d have expected. Selwyn Bones had turned to me in a fit of confusion after being disappointed by one he thought to be his beautiful dark angel; he’d gone after Sally Hitchens to take his mind off his terrifying aimlessness, not to have a post-fuck heart-to-heart with her over tea and crumpets.

And it really had been quite a good fuck, as those things went. He’d not bothered about permission to put his hands wherever he liked, he’d just fucking done it, looking at me like he was a Bones of old, a true lord of the manor type, and I was his ripe, fearful peasant girl, trembling with the urge to make herself useful.

“Oh, Sal,” I murmured to myself, quite unable to keep my hands from wandering downwards to tease myself again, “you really are a bit mad for it.” My pleasant languor post-wank set me up for a nice, restful sleep, leaving me more than enough time to wake for the early bird flight out to Lyon, which I’d done but not completely done a year or two ago, and was eager to finish off.

Nearly half a day later, my mood high as anything from several hours of sightseeing, I returned to my hotel room to shed my camera and change out of my flamboyant maxi dress. Newly garbed in my usual nondescript throwaways– cheap jeans, a dark T-shirt and cheap trainers– I took my time pulling my hair into a bun, mentally running through the hops I’d have to make to get down to Nimes, since I wasn’t taking the train.

“Grenoble, Nice, Marseilles,” I muttered to myself. Roundabout, of course, but it’d make me look like your normal wizard tourist, it’d get me on the Floo logs for a week or so, if anyone missed my man in Nimes so much that the French Ministry decided to look into it. “Grenoble, etcetera, going.”


	3. poorly suppressed craving

You’ll recall that I said the Nimbus charity do began well, then veered off into disaster– my almost-brush with discovery, followed by my falling over backwards for Selwyn Bones and somewhat regretting the experience. It took a couple of weeks for me to realize that my poor choices from that weekend had far-reaching effects.

Thankfully, none of those effects had anything to do with the man in Nimes, who died entirely satisfactorily. I wasn’t caught faking an unpleasant muggle man’s suicide, and I even managed to come away from the trip with some particularly fitting souvenirs, the sort of thing I could safely show off to anyone. Less thankfully, the fallout from the ball was first made apparent at work, beginning with Angelina starting to give me a certain sort of sideways, commiserating look.

She asked, the Monday after Nimes, whether things had gone all right with me and Selwyn Bones. In response, I gave her my favourite blank look, the one that said ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m far too nice and polite to ever say it’, and that line of questioning died out rather quickly.

Then, as the weekend approached, Cho Chang asked me if I thought it’d be all right if she tagged along to that Sunday’s Weasley dinner, and I gave her a slightly less blank look and told her she’d be better off asking Angelina. “ _I_ just tag along sometimes,” I said, earnestly. “I’d feel ever so odd being the one to bring someone. D’you know what I mean?”

That Sunday, Cho tagged along to the Weasleys’, and I spent a few soothing hours in Bexeley, sorting out one of the two men I’d had to reschedule a month or so ago. Cho and Angelina came to work together on the following Monday, full of silly stories and shared grins about their all having buggered off with the younger set to the pub in Otterton on Sunday evening, stories I smiled at and tried to look just a little envious of while mostly feeling relieved that I hadn’t gone, and that I therefore hadn’t had to be the stick in the mud crying off early.

I don’t drink, you see. I’ll have a sip or two to fit in, or if it’s that time of the month, and I’m sick of my dildo and my favourite fantasies and I’m trawling for someone real to tussle with, but generally, I don’t do alcohol, mostly because people expect you to relax, unfold and unwind to them when you’re drunk, and that’s the last thing I want to do around anyone I actually know.

“We’re planning to go again next Sunday,” Angelina said, giving me an encouraging look. “You know, maybe try to make it a regular thing. Tilly Fawcett’s due back from Spain this week, so she’ll probably come…”

And, just like that, the Otterton pub do had suddenly become a Thing, not an established, regular event, but certainly hoping to be one, with people looking into their planners and sighing over how they wouldn’t be able to stay long, but would definitely still try to look in. Dutifully, I did my own bit of nodding in response to the sighs, and privately resigned myself to needing to make an appearance that Sunday.

Sunday, though, turned out to be too awkward for many to make it; the Weasleys weren’t the only family with a settled tradition of gathering round the main hearth on that day. The pub do was pushed to Saturday night, then to Friday, with vague promises about alternating the day and location of the not-quite-party in future. I nodded and agreed wholeheartedly with all these changes, all while hoping that some work emergency would pop up to save my day and ruin everyone else’s.

* * *

Unfortunately, Friday night saw me getting off work a little earlier than normal, Mr. Samuelson having heard of the planned event, and having even allowed that he and his missus might just pop round for a few pints before they went on to the opera. So, rather than stick out by being the only one to cry off, I went along with a hesitant smile, and made sure I ended up Flooing to the pub with Angelina, who I was fairly sure would be too occupied in chatting with the Weasleys to pay much attention to me.

Naturally, all my worrying and planning on that score turned out to be in vain. When we stepped out of the pub’s fireplace, we emerged into something much more than the loud, pleasantly busy Friday evening crowd I’d been expecting. It was enough of a crush that I’d have been able to lose myself in it and dodge away early after being seen, but of course, since I’d come in on Angelina’s heels, there was nothing for it but to smile and exclaim and tag along with her as she headed for the cluster of redheads some few tables away.

“For fuck’s sake,” Weasley– the tall, scarred one, this time– muttered, some time later, from a little way down the pub table we were all crammed in at. “Where’d all these bloody people come from?”

His wife, Fleur Weasley, the only woman at this table who was _not_ squashed against anyone, let out a low, long sigh. “It is simply not our week, I think.” When she drooped forward, running slim hands through her blonde hair, you could feel several men and some women in the general vicinity of the table desperately wanting to leap to their feet and hustle over to offer their aid; though thoroughly pregnant, and not in the least glowy about it, Fleur was also quite thoroughly a Veela. “We could just walk, for a bit. Get some air.”

“You want to make your way out, through all this?” was the low, grimly amused answer, answered in turn by a brief, delicate wrinkling of the nose. “At the very least, the pie’s worth having. They do a really very good steak-and-ale here.”

“Steak,” Fleur moaned, like one sentenced to death by drowning, and looked pained when Ginny rhapsodized about the fine quality of this pub’s bangers and mash and only just adequate fish and chips and substandard, but still serviceable curry. But when the table orders came, ferried to the table by our stout, harried waitress, Fleur laid claim to nearly as much as Ginny did, and considerably more than Bill– yeah, that was it, another Weasley man appropriately identified– did, and indeed more than I or Angelina or even George did.

Most of it was some sort of Weasley inside joke, where Fleur had to try a bit of every different dish that had been ordered, and pronounce it “ _merde, incroyable_ ” or swallow it with a thoughtful “hmm, _passable_ ”. She ended up stealing half of Ginny’s curry, while Ginny commandeered an extra plate of bangers and mash that had been misdelivered, one that everyone had insisted to the returning, sighing waitress that it was fine to add to the growing bill.

“Not sure how we’ll manage a sane split,” Angelina murmured, after that. “They must be rushed as anything in the kitchen, sending that our way by accident.” Angelina, apparently, in the summers after her fifth and sixth year, had worked in the kitchen here as some sort of favour to her mother’s aunt’s brother’s cousin, something like that, one of those thin connections that wizarding folk held so very dear to their hearts. “I did warn them that there’d be a bit of a crush, but I suppose they thought it’d be all right since Harry couldn’t come.”

“But don’t you see, even if he can’t come tonight, everyone now knows he comes _some_ nights,” Ginny piped up, earnestly. Which would have been believable about two pints ago, or if she hadn’t said something much like this as we first struggled through the crush to join them at their table, only in a much less believably earnest, rather more cynical tone. “And he could always swing by, y’know, after his shift– oh Angie, come _on_ , it’s only my third!”

“You said earlier, to cut you off when you get too sweet,” George said, repressively. And quite a trick that was, pulling it off when he was quite squinty with drink himself. “No buts, you’re off.”

“Bill…”

“No,” was the firm, if slightly indulgent answer. “And before you say anything, it’s home for you tonight, or nothing. Cottage is strictly off limits.”

“But, Billll…”

I think that was what was meant by sweet, though it seemed more like nearly whining to me, for all that Ginny had widened her eyes and leaned her weight heavily against his left shoulder.

“It works on Harry,” Angelina said to me, dryly, possibly having spotted me frowning. Which was a sign of my drinking, that I’d frown openly in this company. “Kind of have to see it to believe it, honestly. You can sort of see him thinking, ‘now, I _know_ she’s playing up’, but then she leans in, and you can just see him caving.”

“It makes one worry for the security of this country,” Fleur said, sagely. “Seeing an Auror, trainee or no, bend so easily.”

“Just because it happened _once_ ,” Ginny began saying, loudly, just as Susan Bones came up, shouldering her way through the crowd. “Susie! Did you bring sell? Oh my god, I haven’t seen you in ages, how _are_ you?”

“Crushed,” Susan half-shouted back, leaning in to give Ginny a brief hug. “This bloody crowd… And yeah, he’s, I could have sworn he was– sell? Sell, over here!”

Which was when Selwyn Bones extricated himself from the crowd, dodging neatly round a waitress that had slowed a moment to give him the eye. _Oh, Christ,_ I thought, even as I forced up a bland, welcoming smile for both he and his cousin’s sake. _What an astonishing coincidence, his just happening to be brought here by his cousin, who Ginny knows well enough to trade air kisses with._

Though, from the surprise on Angelina’s face, and the unruffled calm on Mr. Bones’, it really might have been exactly that: an unfortunate coincidence. After all, there were only so many wizards and witches on this cursed isle, and they all most definitely knew each other, or knew of each other.

“Sal,” Ginny said, reaching around Angelina’s back to pat me on the shoulder, her eyes sparkling madly, “meet sell–” and here, she paused to make a flourishing gesture in Mr. Bones’ direction. “And then, Sel–”

“Oh my god, you have to stop with it,” George groaned. “It’s only funny once! It’s not one of those jokes that get funnier when you say them again and again–”

“Well, you said it first, mate,” Bill said, innocently. “Doesn’t say much about your abilities, that you came out with that stinker.”

“I was _drunk_ ,” was the indignant answer, said loudly enough that I felt as if half the pub must have heard it. “She’s the one that keeps–”

“ _You’re_ the one that started that stupid joke about me and Harry,” Ginny retorted. “You know how he is, you know he’d never say anything–”

“Susan, did you want to sit?” Angelina said, her tone only just a little desperate. “Sally and I can squeeze in, if you do.”

“Oh, well, I was thinking, erm,” Susan hastened to say, even as she looked up and down this length of the pub, which had not at all stopped being crammed full of people. “I’d hate to put you out, and I don’t know where Sel will fit…”

So she _did_ call him that, that very awfully toffish nickname. I couldn’t help but chance a glance at him then, to see what he thought of it, only to see that he was sporting the same unruffled look as before, as if there was nothing at all interesting or alarming going on, nothing like his being volunteered to be squeezed in beside, or perhaps even between, the viciously arguing George and Ginny Weasley.

_Well,_ I thought, as I slowly rose from my seat, supposedly only to let Susan squeeze her way past to sit between Angelina and Ginny, _nothing says I’ve got to stay the whole night._ “Actually,” I said, leaning over the table a bit, “I’m kind of thinking I could go to the bar? For another round?” A round that could easily be delivered in my absence, with my compliments. “Bill, Fleur, anything?”

“Another of these things, with the grapefruit,” Fleur said, imperiously. Or perhaps that was just her being tired, or a bit annoyed at the still ongoing argument. “Bloody Mary for Bill?”

Bill nodded at that, with a sideways smile at her; some shared joke, probably. Angie didn’t want another cider, and both George and Ginny were arguing too earnestly over who was the _real_ drunk to pay my question any attention, and Susan hemmed and hawed and said it’d be lovely if I could get her a lager. Then turned her slightly guilty gaze on Mr. Bones, to ask for what he’d like, only to be told, smilingly, that he’d figure it out at the bar when he got there with me.

“After all,” he said, smoothly, “three drinks is already quite a bit for her to bring back on her own, especially through this crush, and that’s not counting what she’ll be having.”

“Aw,” Ginny cooed, “isn’t that just _sweet_.” Probably it’d have been embarrassing to have that tone of voice directed at him if she hadn’t been saying the words while looking daggers at her brother. “Couldn’t you just die from watching him go on like that? _Such_ a gentleman.”

Bones’ smooth, unruffled expression faltered. Sighing, I took hold of his shirt sleeve and tugged pointedly, smiling tightly at him when he frowned down at me, and that was how it was that we ended up crushed in together at the bar, having just escaped from the start of what looked to be an epic Weasley argument.

“Grapefruit soda twist, Bloody Mary, lager, and one cider,” I half-said, half-shouted to the stressed barman, who gave me only the barest nod of acknowledgement, being in the midst of pouring a row of shots for what looked like half of the Puddlemere side. “God, this is all a bit much, isn’t it?”

Bones, unruffled once again, smiled just a bit before leaning down and in towards me and saying, “You didn’t even try to ask what I wanted.” And then added, when I stared up at him: “Punishing me, are you?”

I scowled, then blinked hard, to get myself out of it, because I’d sworn I’d only meant to give him a bit of a frown. “No, you goose,” I managed to say back. “The cider’s for you.”

That didn’t do anything to shift the eternal unruffled look, but it did make him lower his eyelashes at me. “So,” he said, right in my ear, “you didn’t ask what I liked, but you didn’t forget me. Can I assume,” he went on, his hand brushing lightly against the back of my arm, “that I’m not entirely in your bad graces?”

You’d expect that that was when I lost my head and let him take hold of my hand and lead me through the crowd and out the pub door and into a nice, empty alley so he could bend me over against a wall and fuck me silly, but it wasn’t. I held out, though that one touch was enough to make my breathing unsteady. _The nerve,_ I wanted to say, but didn’t. “You left,” I said, instead, hoping he would take my bluntness as something that came from being a bit tipsy. “And– and you were rude. If you want to apologize, do it. If you don’t…”

From the way he stepped in close against me, ostensibly to make way for a frowning older woman eyeing the crowd around her with confusion and disgust, I knew my request for an apology was going to be used against me. “I’m very,” Mr. Bones murmured, his breath warm against my ear, “ _very_ sorry.”

I wondered how on earth he managed to make me hear him, when it was still so loud around us. I refused to acknowledge the way it made me feel, bolstering my calm facade by thinking about the kinds of spells, wandless and not, that he could have used to achieve that effect, that intimate not-quite-whisper. Then our drinks came, and the tense, embarrassingly arousing hush between us was broken, half by the stop-start pace we were forced to take through the crush, and half by the measuring way Bones was studying me now.

_That’s right,_ I thought. _Give up, while you’re still alive._ Then I checked myself, putting on a small, careful smile, berating myself for being stupid enough with drink, irritation, or both, that I’d let my expression go blank while thinking about killing someone presently paying attention to me.

“There they are,” Ginny called out, as we approached the table, and for the next few moments, I was pleasantly distracted in handing out the drinks, giving away everything but the cider I’d hastily promised to Mr. Bones. That, I kept, though it would have been the easiest thing to slide it over to him, crushed as he was between me and Susan.

I sipped at it instead, slowly. I couldn’t help but feel pleased that he glanced at me from time to time, or that he was doing his level best to keep his shins away from mine beneath the table. When my cider was gone, he was the one to suggest another trip back to the bar, a trip I silently joined him on.

After he ordered (“Three grapefruit twists, one whiskey, and two ciders, please.”), we lingered at the bar together, a small but pointed space between us. Then, just as the barman was working furiously on the last grapefruit twist, Bones turned a little more to me and said, in a far less honeyed tone than previously: “I _am_ sorry.”

“It’s alright,” I said, nodding stiffly, happy enough now that I could play out the final twist in this wretched story we had made together. “Really.”

“Really?”

“Your order,” the barman said, loudly, and the moment was done, was finished on the chilly note I wanted. Mr. Bones trailed me back to our table in silence, laden down with the cocktails. When we got back, I more than half expected him to try and sit on the other side of the table, to avoid being crushed in with me again, but all he did was smile and shrug and slide in next to Susan just as before, after handing her the last grapefruit twist.

“Really, Selwyn?” Susan said, teasingly. “I thought you said you’d join us with one of these,” and she wiggled her already half-empty glass at him a bit. “Then again, these do go really quickly.”

“You don’t guzzle it like that,” Fleur said. “It is to be savoured. Slowly.”

“Hmm,” was Susan’s noncommittal response, as she downed the rest of hers. “I’m too in the mood for something with an actual kick, I think. Sel, Sally, I’m really sorry, do you mind?” Seeing as she was the one struggling to her feet, and probably aiming to go to the bar for herself, I mostly didn’t mind having to stand and shuffle out and shuffle back in again.

After she left, George and Ginny and Bill led our half of the pub in a truly ear-splitting rendition of the Hogwarts school song supposedly for Mr. Bones’ sake. I downed the rest of my– third?– cider to keep from being made to join in, trying not to think of anything. I wanted to exit soon; I had to be alert for the right moment for it.

I chose poorly. I knew Bones hadn’t been singing along, knew he was still nursing his barely empty cider, knew he was glancing at me now and then. And yet, when I half-shouted, over the dying throes of the song, that it was past time that I head home, I started with surprise when he got up with me.

“Walk you to the apparition point?” he offered, politely, not so much as touching me. I didn’t like it, but, soused and irritated as I was, I knew better than to do anything but smile and nod, gratefully, but not too gratefully. “Shall we?”

I put my hand on his offered arm, walking off with the catcalls of George and Ginny echoing behind us. As we threaded our way through the crowd, as Mr. Bones shouldered open the pub door for me, all I could think of was how to escape whatever nonsense he was planning without killing him.

Together, still with a slight, pointed space between us, we walked, arm in arm, down the street. I paused at the first alley to our left, then towed him into it, having seen that it was empty. Tensing, I put up a solid Notice-Me-Not at the entrance to the alley, and then an _Obscurus_ a few strides in, since I could just about make out the street the other end of the alley led to.

“This alright?” Mr. Bones said, his tone warm with concern, his arm feeling pleasantly solid beneath my tense grip. “Ta, then.”

I was an idiot. I was standing there staring up at him, my hand tightening on his arm when he tried to pull away, rather than seizing my chance to be shot of him. “I,” I found myself saying. “Yes, um. Goodnight.”

Naturally, just as I forced myself to let go of him, he turned fully toward me. I took a shaky, useless step back. He advanced, his expression intent, his mouth parted.

_Stop_ running _from him,_ I snarled at myself, but of course that didn’t make it any better, it only encouraged him to step in very close to me, and put his hands on my hips. Lightly, barely a touch, but of course I felt it. “Mr. Bones–”

“Selwyn. Call me Selwyn.”

I had to find some way out of this, some way to put him off enough that he would retreat, and give me time to come back to myself.

“Please,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “Let me do this for you.”

“I don’t–”

His hands moved, stroking over the sides of my hips. Slowly, he shifted the path of his touch, slowly enough that I could stop him, that I could wriggle away from his simple, heated caressing. I didn’t move. Shivering, I let his hands settle on the curve of my arse.

“Here?” Selwyn asked. “Or do you want– at yours?” He sounded uncertain.

“Not yours?” I found myself saying, snidely, to see how he’d react. I knew what it probably meant that he wouldn’t even mention it as an option, and I felt uselessly vindicated when his hands tightened on me, and the uncertainty on his face drained away, replaced by cool, cruel calm.

“Here, then,” he said, and in a trice, I went from being fondled rather gently to being crushed against an alley wall, my body trembling as he stroked it, as he rucked up my robes and pulled down my thick tights and plunged his hand down the front of my knickers, spearing his fingers right inside me without so much as a may-I.

“No,” I heard myself say, breathily. Weakly.

“Do you actually want me to stop?” A rhetorical question, said in a tone that was half amused, half gloating. “You certainly don’t sound it.”

“I don’t,” I sobbed. “Oh, I don’t, I don’t–”

“Do you want it here? Right here?”

It was cruel to ask; surely he could feel me shaking, feel me tightening, feel me getting close. “You know what I want,” I whispered, because he did, just this once. Just for this one, tortured moment.

He went on torturing me anyway, teasing me with his fingers, putting his hand over my mouth and warning me I’d get what was coming to me if I didn’t shut the fuck up. “If you don’t want my cock in your arse, dry, you will be quiet.”

For a long, an excruciatingly long moment, I bit my lip and thought of it, hazily, half wondering if I even wanted– no, if I could even bear such a thing, if he were in the frame of mind to do it.

The moment passed. I was too silent, and he was too much interested in having me where I was wet, where he could plunge his fingers in and exclaim over my utter whoredom.

“Just going to talk about it, then?” I muttered, impatient, already having forgot his little threat. “Or are you–”

He cut me off with a hand about my throat, so swiftly I didn’t see it coming. “I warned you,” he said, his tone so flat that I struggled, half rejoicing, half expecting the worst. “ _Commollio_.”

I whimpered a little, despite myself, at the shock of sensation, the warmth that seemed to sink into me. When he repositioned his hand, spearing his fingers into my arse, I flinched; the spell had relaxed me, had prepared me there for him, but it didn’t feel like it’d be enough. Two fingers already felt like far too much. “Don’t,” I whispered, aching for it, aching for something more, something worse to happen, something that would hurt. “Please, Selwyn, don’t.”

For answer, he slid his fingers out of me and forced me to turn and face the wall, crowding me as he did so, though not enough to prevent my leaving if I really wanted to. And that was if, poor, naive Sally wished to; he was close, and I could feel the hard ridge of his cock against my bare arse, the smooth, fine cloth of his expensive trousers nearly the only thing between us, but he wasn’t holding me still. “I warned you,” he murmured. “You know what’s due to you.”

The sound his zip made was, for a moment, the only thing I could seem to hear. Then: “Spread yourself for me. Do it.”

And I did it, bending over a bit, my hands shaking as I reached back and took hold of my arse cheeks, spreading them wide. I stood there like that for one long moment, exposed before him, knees trembling, my mind in my aching, clenching cunt.

When he entered me there, I cried out, and I came, hard, because I knew this could only be the start of it. I knew he was teasing me with these first, rough thrusts in and out of my cunny, where I was easy and wet for him, and all I could think about was how it didn’t hurt, yet, but it would.

When he pulled all the way out of me, I tensed, struggling to hold in a thin, high whine. He came back, pressing the blunt, slick head of his cock against my arsehole, and then just pressing it in, stretching me, hurting me despite the way his spell had prepared me. “Ssh,” he said, his voice low. Soothing. “You’ll like it.”

I felt so wet now, so empty, and yet so painfully full. He was rocking deeper into me, stretching my aching arse around his thick cock; I felt too full to think, and I needed–

“Get away from there,” he muttered, slapping my trembling hand away from the slick lips of my cunt. “That’s mine to do, understand?” I moaned. He withdrew a little, then thrust back in, slowly, pinching my aching clit. “Mine. Understand?”

“Yeah,” I heard myself say, lowly. “Oh. Oh, god.”

I was going to come. He was, I was letting him, he was deep in my arse in the alley behind the Weasleys’ regular pub, and it hurt and hurt and I was sick inside from wanting it. From taking it.

I went limp then, relaxing into it, and he groaned and picked up the pace, encouraged, of course he was encouraged, because only a real whore would like it, want it like this, want to be hurt, enjoy it… I came again, listening to him run me down in short, brutal phrases. I was still shivering in the aftermath of it when he went still behind me, sighing as he emptied himself, his breaths hot and harsh and unsteady against the back of my neck.

When he finally withdrew, he did it slowly, squeezing the curve of my arse as he did so. Fondling me. It felt, it should have felt just weird, feeling his come drip out of me like that, but instead, with the way his hands were still on me, the way he was obviously watching me as he kneaded and spread and squeezed my arse cheeks, it just felt deliciously humiliating, especially when he rubbed his thumb over my aching hole, very gently. “Oh dear,” he murmured. “That’ll sting tomorrow. Shall I…?”

“No,” I heard myself say, rather curtly, though I really wouldn’t have minded his taking out his wand and perhaps giving me an _Episkey_ or two. It did rather ache, back there. But I was thinking, now, as I straightened, and did my best to wipe clean and pull up my tights, that he’d been rather cavalier about all of this, just assuming I’d enjoy his being so rough even though he hardly knew me at all. “I’m all right, thanks.”

_Now_ he chose to frown down at me, just a little, as he wiped himself down and tucked his cock away. “Too much?”

“It very nearly was,” I said, coolly. I wanted to say something snide, in addition, about– about his lordly manner, about how he’d better not go round pushing it on people this way. But I didn’t say anything, because I was jittery now, all of a sudden, and unsure if the cause of my unease was the fact that he’d hurt me, or the fact that I’d allowed it because I liked it. “See you around, I guess.”

“Right,” Selwyn said, his frown gone, his cool gaze surveying me once again from behind his mask of polite disinterest. “Good night.”

“Night,” I murmured, and could not Apparate away fast enough. To a small park in Taunton, first, because I needed to take a breath, and because I was having a sudden, extremely unwelcome thought about how Selwyn might easily be the sort of bastard to turn around and go back into the pub and run me down in some sly, backhanded fashion, and I wouldn’t know he’d done it until Monday, and everyone was giving me half-pitying, half-intrigued, and most definitely scandalized glances.

“It comes to that,” I muttered, narrowly avoiding tripping over my shoe tray when I Apparated home, “you’re well within your rights to top him.” I wouldn’t do it right away, of course. I’d wait, and wait, and _wait_ , and then, just when he’d forgotten… “No one’d blame you. No one at all.”

Then, as I stumbled over to my bedroom, wriggling partway out of my clothes before climbing into bed, I thought back to the moment he’d pressed his thumb against me, against the hurt he’d done me, and asked, in his smooth, self-assured way, if he could soothe it, and I groaned, pulling my pillow over my head, because that was it, that _was_ why I’d gone all bristly. I could take him being a straightforward bastard, I could take him being prickly, and I could probably even stand his making fun of me or scoffing at me in his head, but that, that attempt to be soothing? Absolutely not.

That, to me, had felt somehow fake. Dishonest. As if it mattered to me, how he acted; as if I hadn’t minded him playing a role with me so long as it was the role I expected. “Christ,” I mumbled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say I had a blooming crush.”

* * *

Thankfully, though the next day made it quite clear to me that I _had_ a crush, it didn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could or would immediately affect me. Once I’d applied some salve to my aching arse, and I’d made judicious use of the bathtub, it felt like nearly any other Saturday morning, Friday nights being my usual pulling night, if I was pulling.

I lingered in the bath. I got out, puttered aimlessly around the kitchen, and ended up with a hasty potato casserole started, as well as a bit of my homegrown bread improver, since I remembered I was about to run out. Mum, an ardent traditionalist in all things bread, would have sniffed and narrowed her eyes at the mere suggestion of anything other than flour, salt and yeast, but Mum didn’t mind punching down every hour on the hour to get a good result, and I always have.

To my way of thinking, force was the one thing magic could do reliably; force, and certain simple types of chemical reaction. And it was a change, wasn’t it, from tinkering with drying and curing times for the usual standard broom lengths of boring old wood, so even though my croissants and my Danish dough had yet to approach the quality of Mum’s, I still couldn’t help trying.

The results, that weekend, were just good enough that I didn’t think twice about ferrying in a small batch of finished croissants to work on Monday. It wasn’t until I was backing away from the platter while my workmates advanced on it that I remembered there was anything to think about, any reason to watch their reactions to me more closely.

“Oh, Sal, you didn’t,” Angelina said, delighted, having popped her head out of her office to see what the fuss was about. “Well, it’s obvious _someone_ was in a good mood.”

“Er,” I said, freezing inside, because I had never not brought in something bang on the two-week mark, rain or shine, murders or no murders done. It was easy goodwill, and the sort of goodwill that made people think of an otherwise quiet, possibly surly girl as having a soft, nurturing, feminine side. Even when I’d been on a break from vacations, and getting shirty with it, I’d made certain to bring in iced cupcakes. “I dunno, I just had a bit of extra time on hand, so I thought–”

“But you went home with him,” Violet burst out, her hand over her mouth, her half-eaten croissant forgotten. “I mean, I heard, Angelina said–”

“I didn’t say _that_ ,” Angelina said, hastily. “I meant I just thought it quite sweet that he walked you out of the pub.”

“He didn’t come back, though, did he?” Cho said, the interfering witch. “At least, I think I remember Susan wondering where he’d gone.”

“Nothing happened,” I hastened to say, having finally found my voice. Fortunately, I sounded almost calm; unfortunately, I was flushing, and I could not bear to meet anyone’s eyes; if someone had happened to see us disappear behind my _Obscurus_ , or worse still, reappear from behind it, they would _know_ we’d been fucking. “I don’t know why he didn’t go back in, after he saw me off. Maybe he was tired, and he just thought he’d pack it in, after.”

“Hmm,” Angelina said. “But you know, he _was_ looking at you an awful lot. Did he say anything?”

“All he said was good night,” I said, hoping I wasn’t being too emphatic. “I really do think you’re all seeing more in it than there really is.”

“So you mean you _don’t_ fancy him?” Cho said, blinking innocently.

“It’s not– that’s not the point,” I found myself saying, a little too loudly, because I could see that was the general thought anyway, and so why even bother not being just the tiniest bit real in my reactions. “I mean, him and me, it’s not at all, it just wouldn’t _work_.” Christ, too real, reel it back. “I mean, he’s nice to look at, and all–”

“Just nice?” Cho said, teasingly, which only made me flush harder, and feel a thorough idiot, because I thought I hadn’t been obvious about looking at him, but from her expression, and the particularly pitying look Violet had trained on me, I _had_ been obvious. “Oh, all right, Angie, I’ll stop. You needn’t glare that hard.”

“It’s only,” Angelina said, repressively, “that the reports need doing, and you lot are all standing round staring and feasting on croissants rather than putting a shoulder to them.”

“All right,” Violet said, raising her free hand, and waggling the croissant in Angelina’s general direction. “My last one. Virtuous, me, though it’s difficult to be when they’re baked so very well– lovely lamination, Sal.”

And there it was, the other reason I liked Violet, who was nearly always the only one to be able to articulate just what was right or wrong with my bakes in any sort of helpful detail. “Thank you,” I couldn’t help but say. “I worked quite hard on that this time, I really focused.”

“In my opinion,” Violet said, a wicked gleam in her eye, “that Bones lad couldn’t do much better. Never having to buy his own croissants? That’s a definite winner.”

“ _Violet._ ”

“I’m off, I’m gone, reporting…”


	4. final fold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was later than I thought I'd be in getting this out, sorry >.<

So, you see the scope of the disaster. Nothing unmanageable, understand, just enough annoying and uncomfortable that Selwyn Bones was at the front of my mind rather more than I would have liked, and worse, very clearly thought to be there by nearly everyone I interacted with.

Line workers that ordinarily breezed past my station on the way to or from Angelina’s office stopped to give me sympathetic glances and to ask how I was doing. People looked at me when Selwyn’s name came up– which was often, just then, as Mungo’s was having their annual charity drive, and he had chipped in handsomely for the renovation of the spell damage ward.

I couldn’t blame Mungo’s for exploiting the papers’ frenzy for Bones-related news for all that it was worth; I couldn’t really blame my co-workers, either, for being swept up in the office gossip’s current fixation on him. He _had_ been seen squiring me about at the Nimbus ball; he _had_ walked me home from the Otterton pub do, and had not been seen thereafter. And poor, naive Sally had avoided meeting people’s eyes and grown rather defensive when asked about all of it, so there _was_ some fire beneath all the tantalizing smoke, at least on her side.

I couldn’t even blame the man in question, not really, though I put some hours of effort into trying to. It was difficult to hold on to any feeling about him with any consistency, any feeling, that was, other than an embarrassingly strong lust. He was masked, just as I was, and he was cruel beneath that mask, in just the way that I liked, sexually. He had not yet boasted to anyone of anything he had done to me, either, or surely I’d already have been hearing about it, or seeing the mortifying increase in the public sympathy shown me.

He was, in short, someone I was trying very, very hard not to want, and worse, making me rather peevish about my failure to stop wanting him.

By the time the next Weasley dinner I could attend (I took a weekend off, for the second man in Bexeley) rolled around again, I was almost relieved to learn, beforehand, from a slightly chagrined Angelina, that Selwyn was invited.

“It’s all right,” I said, stoutly, a little annoyed, the way I often seemed to be, these days, by the feeling that Angelina did not quite believe my cheerful tone. “I don’t mind it.”

“Really?” Angelina said, her tone sceptical. She’d gone, apparently, from being amused and a little curious to see what would come of all the gossip about my and Selwyn, to being rather obviously against the idea of anything coming of it, Selwyn having cut a flirtatious swathe at Mungo’s reception for the re-dedication of the renovated ward. “You’ll definitely make it?”

“I’ll be there with bells on,” I said, nodding emphatically. “Mrs. Weasley’s making her chelsea buns, you know. I’d never turn down a chance to peek at _that_ recipe.”

“Oh, but Sal, there’s nothing wrong with yours–”

“Well, yes, but they’re not as good as hers,” I muttered. Which _was_ a sore point, especially since Mum had all but refused to tell me what to do differently unless I promised to leave off trying to shoehorn my dough improver into it. “If I’m early enough, she might even let me help with them.”

I was early, too. Mostly because I realized, that dreary Sunday morning, that if I didn’t start off for the Weasleys’ immediately, I would be made late from fussing uselessly over which pair of robes to wear, when I usually just went in muggle clothes or whatever I had left over from the work week. Which was just beyond the pale, though not because I’d never dithered over my appearance for anyone’s sake before. I was horrid gone on Victor Krum (that _frown_ ), and then, next year, on Roger Davies (heartbreak had looked very well on him), and Lisa Bennet, my then dormmate and sometime friend, had been utterly annoyed at how late I’d been to everything as a result.

But the Weasleys, and perhaps Cho Chang, were not at all in her category. _They_ had not all but forced me to apply to Nimbus, had not helped me shop for robes, had not held my hand as I cried, the first week of my last term at Hogwarts, because I had just come back from my first holiday, and it hadn’t felt like enough.

Lisa had assumed, of course, that I was just stressed out and worried about the fact that Nimbus hadn’t yet got back to me, but she’d still sat there with me, silently soothing, her hand squeezing mine.

In any case, the Weasleys were not her, and were not yet, and would likely never be admitted to the small circle of those who might occasionally see me as I was, and not just as I pretended to be. I would rather have slit every one of their throats rather than let them see me stumble in through the Floo, clearly embarrassed, and overdressed, and stammering my apologies for being so very late to dinner.

Instead, they were treated to more or less the usual quiet Sally, nearly turned out in her threadbare potions-slash-kitchen robes, and in as good spirits as could be expected from someone that was quite clearly pining after someone she couldn’t have. Mrs. Weasley did not let me help with the chelsea buns– “I wouldn’t dream of making you work on a weekend, sit down, there’s a dear,”– but she did let me watch the whole way through, and even allowed that my magic-assisted dough improver might, just might have merit as part of the recipe.

“You need to be very sparing with that sort of thing,” she said, as she checked on the rise of the second pan of shaped buns. “Generally, with baking, it’s about knowing what _not_ to add, in that department.”

And then it was time for the buns to go in the oven, a massive, heavily charmed muggle model with no window on the front. Mrs Weasley waxed enthusiastic about how Mr. Weasley had found it for her, and went into a little too much detail about how he’d got all the switches working even though it wasn’t running off of electricity.

That mostly one-sided conversation followed us out into the garden, where the usual table was being laid by the slightly scowling Auror Weasley. I helped with that, and with sorting out the gnomes that picked just then to try and sneak back into the herb beds.

“Good arm,” Weasley said, as I hurled the last gnome away. “Clear over the trees, there.”

I shrugged, trying for bashful rather than uncaring. I didn’t like how surprised he sounded to be saying something like that, mostly because the whole point of my act was _not_ to be traipsing around surprising anyone with my unexpected depths. _Mind your role, Sally,_ I told myself, and when Weasley asked if I’d ever played any Quidditch, I said no, but let myself be convinced to jump in to even up the numbers.

I knew the rules– I couldn’t have done three years at Nimbus, or, for that matter, spent seven years sleeping next to Tilly Fawcett, ardent fan of the Wanderers, without picking up most of it. As Potter and various Weasleys trickled in, I switched from being a mediocre Chaser to a serviceable Beater, and then spent a few minutes as a really quite terrible Keeper.

Ginny was the one to sit me out. “You’re awful, _and_ you’re tired,” she said, hovering next to me, her hands busy pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “Leah’s due any minute, too; we’ll just play open until she gets here.”

“Oh, but I said I’d–”

“Nope,” was the cheery answer. “My team, my rules.”

“We’ll be fine,” Cho called out, from a few yards away. “Even if they score, we’ll be two-thirds Harpies when Leah gets here, we’ll make it up.”

“All right,” I said, reluctantly, and was all too happy to fly down and return my borrowed broom to the diminished pile near the shed. Then, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I forced myself to cross the few yards of grass that separated me from the meagre audience, made up of Granger (buried in a book), Granger’s large, mean-looking kneazle (ensconced in her lap), and Selwyn Bones (lounging, naturally).

“Didn’t know you played,” he said, as I dithered over where to park myself without making it look like I was too conscious of him. “You’re not too bad.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, deciding suddenly that I was going to claim the battered chair between him and Granger and pretend to care not a whit about how that was sure to end in me having to brush against him. “I was only filling in, anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

Silence settled between us for two excruciating minutes, broken only by the whispery crackle of Granger turning her pages. Above us, the usual mix of whoops and grunts had levelled off for a bit– Ginny and Cho were putting their heads together, and Auror Weasley was quietly playing catch with his teammates around their own hoop.

_Say something,_ I told myself, though I couldn’t think of anything to do but gossip about balls or complain about the weather. _It’s only polite, and the last thing you want is people thinking you can’t even_ talk _to him._ “Did you go to the–”

“You’re still cross with me, aren’t you?” Selwyn said, just as I started to speak. Then, as I floundered, he added, “oh, I’m sorry, go on. Did I go to…?”

I blinked, hard, then turned to look at him, desperate to see what I was dealing with. I hadn’t been quite looking at him since I’d sat down– stupid, but understandable, considering the state of my crush on him– and I’d assumed he wouldn’t want to do more than make dismissive small talk. Instead, his current expression was only just short of frustrated, and though he’d put on a smile, it was a small, tight one that really shouldn’t have looked as good as it did to me. And it really made him look as if he might just think I was upset with him, and that he was unhappy about it.

“I’m not cross,” I couldn’t help but say. “Not with you.” Then, as I remembered Granger’s proximity, and realized I hadn’t heard a page turn from her in a bit, I hastily added: “It’s only, I hate playing Quidditch.” Which was just true enough that I didn’t mind saying it. “I know I’m not good, but I can’t stop caring, or making myself try, when… Does that make any sense?”

“How on earth did you end up at _Nimbus_ , then?” That was Granger, who’d given up on pretending not to listen partway through my fudged explanation, and had now shut her book. “Oh, I forgot, you’re more on the potions side of things, aren’t you?”

“Well, yes, but even then, I like flying,” I said, defensively. “Just for myself, you know.” It made for an excellent way to see the sights on holiday, so long as you were careful, and packed a good batch of invisibility potion and could cast a nice strong _Obscurus_ in a pinch. It’s not foolproof– I don’t tend to unshrink my broom unless I’m looking to fly over a nice forest or other mostly uninhabited architectural feature– but it is quite nice to have the ability to do a helicopter-style tour on short notice. “It’s really quite relaxing, floating over everything.”

“Not for me,” Selwyn said, with a brief, theatrical shudder, his expression now back to its usual relaxed, smiling brilliance. “Though I suppose you know that already, Hitchens. I don’t think I’ll ever live that time on the tour down, I really did think I’d fall off halfway through…”

“Oh, you know no one would have held it against you,” I couldn’t help but say, struggling not to let the urge to roll my eyes come across in my tone. “ _I_ think you were very brave, doing your first flight in front of half the company.”

Possibly, my efforts to sound earnest had gone a bit too far; even as Granger wryly agreed with my opinion, Selwyn was smiling at me just a little too warmly. Worse, when the call went out for us to come to table– just after Leah Rosen had showed up to bolster the girls’ side, much to Ginny’s aggravation– he walked with me, and very deliberately sat to my left at the table.

Suffice it to say that dinner was hell. It wasn’t so much that everyone was looking at us; so far as I could tell, the only person that bothered to glance in our direction now and then was Angelina. It was more the fact that I was horribly aware that the slightest misstep would mean everyone snatching glances at us, whispering or laughing to themselves over the spectacle we made. Or, more correctly, the spectacle _I_ made, in my obvious, hopeless crush on a natural born flirt.

Who, God curse him, didn’t even flirt in a way that I could publicly hold against him. Selwyn was all polite, but devastatingly lovely smiles, all quiet murmurs on the weather, and very quick to pass the salt, the butter, the beef, the potatoes and the asparagus. His thigh was pressed against mine a good way through the meal, but no one could see that, and when I finally took the opportunity granted by a loud argument to shift my chair to make that impossible, he didn’t try to cosy up to me again.

For him, it was an almost restrained performance. Which should have made me feel something normal like relief or uncertainty or displeasure, or anything other than an odd, blank sort of fury. I didn’t like that he was trying to flirt with poor, naive Sally. I didn’t like that just his smile could make me feel so much, and wish to know what he was thinking.

“Do you want me again?” he murmured, his lips brushing my ear, just as the dinner party was loudly beginning to move away from the table. “Maybe at yours?”

I didn’t know how he could be so shameless, asking that so matter-of-factly. “I– I usually help clear a bit here, first,” I found myself saying. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t stop the warm flush his words had inspired, couldn’t keep my wand from trembling a little as I started to gather up empty plates. “After?”

I half expected him to shrug off that hesitant invitation, seeing as I wasn’t the only target available at this bloody dinner. Cho looked quite lovely in her sleek trousers and severely cut blouse, and Leah-from-the-Harpies was tossing her long, riotous blonde mane and looking very well in her bright green robes.

Then again, most of Leah’s bright smiles and throaty chuckles seemed very obviously directed at the slightly flushing Cho, so perhaps–

“Are you alright, Sally?” Angelina asked, just as I made to leave the kitchen. “Only, you look a bit distracted.”

“Oh, I’m, I’m fine.”

“Selwyn’s not _bothering_ you, is he?” Angelina said, clearly not having accepted my feeble attempt at reassurance. “He’s been a bit…”

I flushed, freezing halfway through the kitchen door. “It’s not what you think,” I said, haltingly, because her worrying for me wasn’t something I wanted to just wave off. People didn’t generally ask these things, even when the possibly-a-victim looked like they needed help. The general impulse was usually not to meddle, not unless they saw something obvious, and even then… “It’s– we’re a bit of a, a casual thing, I suppose. If I didn’t want it, I’d tell him off.”

Then, as Angelina nodded slowly, looking only partly satisfied, I thought of what I had just said, and had to bite my lip to stifle a loud, frustrated curse.

_If I didn’t want it…_

“So long as you’re really alright,” was Angelina’s final mutter. “You Flooing out now, or a bit later?”

“I’m,” I heard myself say, distantly, “I mean, we’ll Apparate, I think.”

Thankfully, that seemed to satisfy her. As I made my escape out of the house, I tried to pay close attention to what I said, what I did with my face and hands, because I knew it would be crucial.

Or rather, I _felt_ it would be, the same deep, irrational way I _felt_ I wanted Selwyn to want me, to notice me and flirt with me and want the guiltily hot fuck I wanted, and maybe just a little more. I felt too much as I saw him walk toward me, skirting the wilder edges of the Weasleys’ disorganized main garden, smiling at me just enough to further scramble my brain.

“Shall we, Sally?” he asked, right in front of what felt like all of the Weasleys but was really only a quarter. And then he held out his arm to me, successfully knocking me out of my muddled haze, because not only was his behaviour a bit too conspicuous for me to ever feel comfortable with it, a voice was screaming in the back of my mind that it couldn’t be anything but a trap.

_No one is this nice without wanting something,_ I thought, all while I blushed and put my hand on his arm, hating myself for wanting, quite an awful bit, to believe in his gallant act. Or to believe that it was an act just for me, for the usual reasons any man will make eyes at a shy woman.

* * *

I handled the Apparition, popping us into my kitchen with minimal displacement and a cold, dead heart. Selwyn smiled down at me just a beat too slow, not quite in time for me to miss the brief disappointment on his face– disappointment I deadened myself to immediately.

_Kill the relationship,_ I thought, returning his smile with something smaller, something more hesitant. _Just the relationship, not him._

I wasn’t at all averse to one more satisfying go at him _before_ I engineered a scene, though, so when he took hold of the back of my neck and half-dragged, half shoved me over my cluttered kitchen table, I went willingly.

I melted, really, which made me ashamed and angry and even more aroused, because I could feel him laughing quietly, and I wanted it to last. But I couldn’t be sure he wanted anything more than to paw at my robes, to drag them up and grope me. And it would be far more sensible to end things decisively now, while I could still be something like rational about letting him go.

I’ve never fixated on anyone, not seriously, but I have done with places, occasionally, and with expected events. The increasingly intense feelings, the upset I felt when confronted with unexpected behaviour, it was all worryingly familiar. I went on something of a bender– largely composed of closeting myself in my mini lab and drinking far too many experimental potions– after I visited an amusement park not too far from where I grew up. When my father was still alive, I had heard about the park, from children at school, or from advertisements on the bus, or some other amorphous, barely-remembered source, and I had wanted more than anything to go.

I had known not to say anything about it; when a mild comment about having had chips for dinner too many days in a row was enough to earn you a vicious slap, you learned to keep things to yourself. So of course, some years later, when the bastard was dead and Mum had got flush enough that she could afford to take me and not have to rely on my cheating us both in, we had tried to make a day of it, and had an awful time.

It had just felt… drab, compared to Hogwarts. Crowded, dirty, loud, and made up of much too much time standing in line. One or two of the rides was good, but the effort required to get on them made me twitchy and angry while I sat through them, and I had squeezed Mum’s hand so hard that she bruised there, and it sickened me.

I had been very careful not to feel too much or expect too much, since then.

“Sally? Are you not…”

And here I was, pinned heavily beneath a man whose breath on my skin made me shudder, whose hands I was already learning to expect too much from, and of _course_ he’d notice I wasn’t quite–

“Sally?”

_Plan B,_ I thought, as I wriggled out from under him, knocking a floury cookbook and an empty mug to the floor as I moved. _Best get it over with, if you can’t even play along well enough to get one more fuck._ “I’m not– I can’t do this.”

Selwyn was already straightening up and pulling away from me. “Too much?”

I had to try twice, to get the words to come out right, and I nearly didn’t say them. It made me sound unbalanced, and I despised it even though I knew it would probably be for the best. “I can’t do this, ever. I just–”

“Why?”

Here was a very good chance to choke out something, a lie tidy enough for him to believe: an ‘it’s just too much’ or an ‘I’m not sure this is going anywhere’, and so on and so forth.

I carefully did not think about why I wasn’t even considering the obvious route of telling him I’d been raped in the past, and thus needed some time to process what I had let him do to me. I tried not to think about why I wasn’t just telling him to leave– screaming at him would make me look even more crazy, and I could tell, even without looking at him, that he wouldn’t stay a moment longer if I changed gear like that.

Something like a scream was building up in my throat, quite without my permission. I should have been making _some_ excuse, but instead, I simply stood there shaking, avoiding his increasingly concerned gaze, even as he slowly, carefully reached out and guided me into his arms.

“I’ve not been raped,” I heard myself say, in a low, choked tone, one partially muffled against his solid chest. “I know that’s what you’re fucking thinking. I _liked_ it.”

Then, when I registered the way he’d gone still, I jerked back and scrubbed at my eyes and said, “I meant I liked what _we_ did, you idiot.”

I was supposed to be letting him go, and here I was, comforting him. Feeling lighter inside just because he relaxed a little and smirked down at me in a way that made my heart skip. When he made to pull me back toward him, I only resisted a moment.

Then we were on the floor together, his weight forcing me down to my hands and knees, and my resolution to drive him off immediately was in flames. _It’s only sex,_ I thought, gasping as he plunged his fingers into me. _I_ know _it’s only sex–_

“You really haven’t ever been raped?” Selwyn asked, quite as if he wanted to know, as if his weight on top of me, and the fact that he’d pinned my arms behind me in an increasingly tight grip was entirely immaterial. Just as it would be, if what he was about to do to me was real. “Astonishing.” He dragged my knickers down, so roughly that I whimpered. “No wonder you’re so trusting.”

“Please,” I whispered, so quietly I could barely hear myself. All I could think of was how it would be, the thick, hot shame I would feel if this were real, and I was trapped, and I could already feel how wet he would find me. “Please don’t.”

Selwyn laughed, and I felt my cunt tighten on nothing. “You think that’s how it works?” His voice grew loud, savage. “You think it works if you beg?”

“Don’t hurt me,” I sobbed. He was rubbing against me already, his cock hard and hot against the clenched curve of my ass, and he had pressed me down even closer to the floor. Without magic, I would have had no leverage to get away from him. _With_ magic– if he was stronger, a better wizard– “Don’t!”

His fingers squeezed my ass, digging cruelly into my newly bare flesh. I knew, just from that, what he wanted, and I groaned aloud when I heard him whisper the spell to prepare me for him. When he shifted on top of me, repositioning himself for the first thrust, I struggled wildly, uselessly, my breaths coming so fast and hard that it left me lightheaded. I screamed– once, and then he cut me off.

He knew just how to do it, how much pressure was enough to stop my cries. I screamed again, thinking, wondering if it would warrant him continuing to choke me, only to realize that I could _feel_ myself screaming, but couldn’t even hear the strangled sound of it in my throat, or feel more than the vibration and the strain of effort.

“No one will hear you,” Selwyn said, his voice thick, his tone low and gloating. “No one’s going to hear you but me.”

After that, I struggled freely. I didn’t scream again, but I wept in silent, gasping gulps as he filled my ass with his hot, hard cock, filled me and filled me again in slow, obscenely slick thrusts. He must have used a different spell than last time, or applied it more strongly; it felt as if he’d worked me open for hours. It felt as if he was going last, or second-to-last; had I been on top of him rather than trapped beneath, my aching, empty cunt would have been leaking fluid all over him.

“Here,” he said, breathlessly, loosening his grip on my arms just enough that I found I had one free. “Touch yourself.”

“No–”

His hand came about my throat again, and I felt myself tensing, squeezing so tight about his cock that I could feel each inch of it being forced back in. “ _Do it_.”

I didn’t. I was coming already, too far gone to help it. When he called me a whore for it, he did so in a tone of great satisfaction; when he forced my hand into place anyway, he could barely manage the coordination to do anything more than force me to press my limp hand against the slick lips of my cunt.

He picked up the pace then, groaning obscenely, _enjoying_ me, savouring how trapped I was, how well-pinned, how open for him. “You’ll suck this cock tonight,” he said. “No matter where it’s been, you’ll open up and suck it. Tell me.”

“I’ll…” I was so close, again. “I’ll suck you no matter what.”

“Good girl,” he growled, and that was it for the both of us.

* * *

Afterwards wasn’t awkward, or rather, wasn’t the same kind of awkward as it had been, in the alley. It probably had something to do with the simple fact of us being inside, shut away from everyone else.

“All right?” Selwyn eventually asked, his voice a pleasant rumble I both heard and felt, since he was pressed close behind me. “Not too much?”

“No,” I muttered. “That was it exactly.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

I sighed, and then thought, _fuck it._ I wasn’t the sort of girl that’d murder him for turning down a relationship after a go like _that_ , surely. Or at the very least, I’d be too tired to really do more than think about it, and then I could confess enough to Mum that she could try and talk me out of it. “I, um…”

“Hmm?”

I was having second and third and fourth thoughts about my sudden plan for blunt, and hopefully endearingly honest questions, but I shoved on anyway. “I don’t want this to be just,” I made myself say, “um. I don’t– I don’t know how you’d feel about, about more than…”

“More than our games?” _Why_ could he manage to say such a thing and have it sound wicked, and not at all cliche? “Hm, I really don’t know.”

Naturally, he made even that sound teasing, like something meant to make me pout and beg, rather than the careful evasion it likely really was. “I don’t want you to joke about it,” I said, glad that he couldn’t see my face. The frown I could feel forming was not something he would be able to shrug off as my being put out, even though it had very little rage behind it, and more in the way of resignation. “Just tell me if we’ve a proper chance or not.”

“We don’t?”

“Please, Selwyn, just–”

“Darling,” he said, ghosting his hand over the bruise he’d left on the side of my hip, “the two of us have had a proper chance since the day we met.”

“Oh?” I couldn’t help but be desperately glad that he still couldn’t see me; even without a visible blush, it’s always been easy for people to tell I’m truly embarrassed. “You mean… the ball, when you dragged me off–”

“We met earlier than that.”

I smiled a little to myself, remembering how even then I’d felt something for him. “You barely even looked at me, on that tour at Nimbus,” I muttered. “I really don’t think it counts.”

“Earlier, I said,” Selwyn murmured, his hand tightening on my hip. “ _Much_ earlier.”

It took me a full five minutes to realize what he was trying to imply, and only a minute to roll and pin him and cast my strongest _Confundus_ at point blank range. No wand, because I’d trained with this spell and others so I didn’t _need_ a wand for them, because they were essential.

“Fucking fuck,” I snarled, as I felt the spell begin to sink in. “The worst, the just absolute worst timing.” I knew I should look at him, but I couldn’t; I didn’t want to see the confusion in his gaze, didn’t want to do the sensible thing and dig in and modify his memory. He may or may not have been serious about wanting me romantically, but either way, I wanted him to remember it exactly. I wanted it to have been real for more than just me. I wanted–

“You know,” Selwyn said, in a low, smooth tone rich with something that was not quite amusement, “my master was very free with a _Confundus_.”

I had to look at him, then. He looked dazed, the way he should, but his eyes were tracking me, and his voice was steady, and his body was slightly tense, just the way someone who’d been attacked would naturally be. Repeated exposure to the _Confundus_ wasn’t studied; Memory Charms, yes, but the _Confundus_? Aurors used it liberally, as direct memory tampering or manipulation was known to be more damaging. The _Confundus_ merely fogged the target’s newest formed memories, the ones recent enough not to have anchored in their mind.

If Selwyn had been repeatedly, unwillingly _Confunded_ , his magical core might have got better at counteracting, or protecting against the effects.

“Let me up,” he was saying, now, in a carefully soothing tone. “You must know I won’t tell on you, by now.”

Shaking, I didn’t move.

“Sally…”

_Now_ , I could move, though jerkily, stumbling up onto my feet. I didn’t look at him, because if I did, I _would_ go through his memories, and I knew I wasn’t presently in the frame of mind to have the necessary light touch.

“Ms. Hitchens,” Selwyn said, his tone suddenly formal, “on my heart, on the blood that sired me, and on the breath I draw now, I swear to never tell another soul of what I know of your dark deeds.” He shifted, behind and below me, and I tensed, only to feel the ripple of a magical vow being sealed– something I was familiar with due to security measures at work.

Only this, this vow Selwyn Bones had just sworn on my behalf was far more consequential than the sort of thing I swore over pertinent details relating to the construction of a Speedwell.

“Better?” The only thing that made it possible for me to even consider turning to face him was the face that he didn’t _sound_ like he thought that vow would make everything better. “Sally–”

“When did you know?” I hadn’t turned fully, so I didn’t understand, for a moment, why he went so still. Then I realized my magic was… out, a bit, the way I only ever let it be when I was with one of my holiday wizards, so I took in a deep breath and tried to dial it back. “I’m not planning on topping you for it,” I added, in what was hopefully a calm tone. “I just want to know.”

Slowly, Selwyn got to his feet, his gaze burning a hole in the side of my head, his hands trembling a little. “Can we sit?”

_If just my asking him a sensible question,_ I thought, but deliberately did not say, _is nearly enough to make him piss himself, why in God’s name did he ever bring this up?_ I managed, somehow, to gesture at the kitchen table, then walk around to the other side and pull up a chair and sit down myself, all while Selwyn inched towards the spare chair opposite me.

His face was still lovely, even when pale with fear. I hated him for it, but only because I couldn’t help but think how low the chances were of us– of us as an ‘us’– moving on from this. People don’t like being viscerally afraid of their partners; they only learn to ignore it or minimize it with months and years of careful, systematic conditioning, as well as pleasant memories and all sorts of interpersonal history, and the most I had working for me was a day or two of nice hard fucks.

“I’m sorry,” I said, flatly, when it was obvious he wouldn’t speak first. “I– I know I frightened you.” Past tense, though the focused way he was watching me hinted more at present, at an ongoing phenomenon, which I didn’t quite understand. “I really, I only ask how– and when– you knew because, well. I’d like to know how or if I slipped up, and gave it away somehow.”

Selwyn smiled– nervously, without quite meeting my eye, and then said: “Would you be very ticked off if I said it was, um, just now?”

Then, as I stared at him, and the tense silence between us grew even worse, he added: “I wasn’t– I thought I’d do it as a joke. I didn’t– I didn’t think–”

_Clearly,_ I thought, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Selwyn was fidgeting now, running his fingers over the rim of the dirty plate in front of him, and he wouldn’t even look at me anymore. “Okay,” I said, and was pleased that my tone was properly calm, calm in a way that made Selwyn’s shoulders relax a bit. “Well. We’ve two options, here.”

“Options?” He still wouldn’t meet my eye, but at least he was looking at me. It’d have been something to laugh about, seeing his gaze so carefully fixed on my chest, if the atmosphere between us wasn’t still so tense.

“It’s– it really depends on what you want,” I murmured. “If you want to remember this…” and I fluttered my fingers a little, feeling both silly and a little chagrined at the way even that small motion made him go still, “…this, um, section of the conversation–”

“You’d _let me_?” Selwyn said, his voice rising a bit. When I met his gaze, he shrank back, but he didn’t look away. “I’m– I assumed–”

“I’m not so good at memory charms that I wouldn’t worry about making a mess, trying to strip something specific from you,” I said, trying not to sound too vehement. “I’d need your cooperation, if, if we were doing that.”

“Oh.”

“If you don’t want to remember,” I said, determined to forge on, “what I’ll need you to do is try to be calm, and focus on the precise moment you realized– realized I was–”

“I don’t want that,” he said, hastily. “I mean, I don’t– I mean I _do_ want to remember. If that’s alright.”

Something stupid and unreasonable within me howled that it wasn’t, that it wasn’t at all alright that he’d look at me this way for as long as he lived, that I’d never have his hands on me again. Somehow, I squashed it down and steeled myself and heard myself say: “Alright.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, again. “I know it’s not… I mean, I know it must be uncomfortable. I can, if there’s another vow, a better one, that’d make you feel a bit more–”

“There isn’t,” I snapped. Then added, with an effort: “There’s ways around even an Unbreakable Vow, for the motivated. You’ll keep my secret, or I will live to make you regret it.”

Silence fell again, between us. I endured it for a moment, then scraped my chair back from the table and set about very calmly trying to address the mess on it, signalling a definitive end to the conversation.

I assumed that a few minutes of sitting stiffly in my kitchen chair while I swept about levitating dirty bowls and dishes and tidying things with extreme prejudice would be enough for Selwyn to take the hint and Apparate away, or perhaps shuffle off out my front door. I kept looking at his slightly hunched back and forcing myself to look away, thinking his chair would be empty the next time I looked.

Finally, after my dishwashing charm was well underway, and what was definitely the fifteenth is-he-still-there look, I gave in to the urge to round on him and say, no, snarl, “Why the _fuck_ haven’t you left yet?”

I don’t know how on earth he ginned up the courage to straighten a bit. I didn’t think he’d moved even once after I got up and started my aggressive cleaning campaign, so he couldn’t see that I was crying. I had been very careful, too, not to sniff out loud.

Still, despite everything, his answer was a light, teasing: “Do you want me gone?”

His voice shook. Probably his hands were shaking too, though I couldn’t see them from where I was standing.

“No,” I said, unsure of what I sounded like, or of what I _should_ have sounded like. He still looked fairly twitchy to me; sounding too decisive could be what drove him away. “If you’d rather not, you don’t have to–”

“I wouldn’t leave right now if you paid me,” he said, and though his voice was still shaky with nerves, I thought I could hear a bit of a smile in it. “Am I, um, am I allowed to ask, about…?”

“You can ask,” I said, turning back to the sink, just to have something to stare at that wasn’t his back or my trembling hands. “Can’t guarantee you’ll get an answer.”

* * *

Selwyn, for all his bravado in that first, fraught, too-truthful exchange, didn’t really end up asking me very many material questions. He wanted to know a lot more, of course; it wasn’t hard to see how curious he was when I explained how I’d decided to off his ‘master’, but wouldn’t go into detail about anything more than those bare facts.

When I finally gained the courage to ask why he continued not to pry, he simply smiled, and said he thought the less I needed to erase from him to be safe, the better. Since we had long since been titled ‘The Awkward Couple’ by the wizarding press, complete with endless speculation on when I’d turn up shamefully pregnant out of wedlock, or when he’d get tired of my camera-shy behaviour and ditch me for a better model, it was more than alright to try to pinch him in retaliation for that bit of cheek.

He knew about the holidays, by then, enough to play my flashy alibi for many of them, and occasionally stand in as a relay point for Portkeys, Apparition, and as general moral support. Erasing the knowledge of my murders from him would have been a monumental, personality-restructuring effort, which he well knew.

He still didn’t let me pinch him.

Our relationship went on being mostly sex, with an extra and surprisingly large side of wordless cuddles. The night he found out I’d been his so-called dark angel, we’d ended up twined around each other on my kitchen floor, occasionally shifting (me) or muttering about how profoundly unnatural Cushioning Charms were, as a phenomenon (him).

He liked to talk to me a lot about that sort of thing, and particularly about the difference between being familiar with the effects of magic, and familiar with casting and using it for yourself. He wrinkled his nose when I told him he’d have made a decent Ravenclaw (which made me think, immediately, _Slytherin_ ), but he didn’t let that off the cuff, semi-serious judgement stop him pontificating.

We weren’t the sort of couple that would go the distance. He was just a bit too wary of me, and I of him, and it didn’t make for a solid connection when both partners tiptoed around each other the way we did. But it was a nice connection to have, a strange and potent thing I sometimes marvelled over, in downtime at work, or as my dough baked, or as I waited for just the right moment to insert myself into a life that was about to end.

I liked to think that, when we tired of the sex, we’d dial the relationship down to meeting once or twice a week for cuddles and low-voiced gossip. I liked to think that, in the end, we’d make awkward, but very good friends.

“Only on one condition,” Selwyn murmured, when I half jokingly, half-seriously told him that idea. “You still make that layered shortbread _thing_ , every other week.”

“Every other month,” I countered, though I already knew I wouldn’t stick to it. There was something very satisfying about watching him demolish them, even while defensively muttering that he still liked dark chocolate best, but it just didn’t work in this one particular context. “You’d still be my plus one to everything, naturally.”

“Naturally,” he said, grinning wickedly up at me. “I fully intend to keep the good folk of _Witch Weekly_ wondering which one of us has the whip hand until the day I croak.”

The truth was that, like most sensible couples, we shared it. His was the bedroom, and the orchestration of most private and nearly all our public dates; mine was the logistics of any travel, and the oven (he turned out to be quite a decent cook, though useless with anything to do with yeast), and our budget, and our interactions with friends and family.

Angelina still didn’t approve of him, but had come to tolerate him once it was clear his presence in my life would be an ongoing thing. Mum was rather alarmingly ecstatic, though she knew very well that neither of us were the type to marry; she even let him meet Bea, her partner of the moment, and boasted of him to her entire sewing circle.

Susan’s reaction was a politer version of the one most people had: easy enough with the idea of us as a thing, but forever just a little confused. Whatever Selwyn’s type had been before he started squiring me around was just enough dissimilar to what I was that it would always cause some confusion, some deep, unspoken, amusingly obvious thought of ‘he’s with _her_ ’?

I suppose the proper way to react to that was to smirk internally and think to myself that the current curious starer should really be thinking that _I_ was the one with _him_. But my reaction was only ever a stifled smile, prompted by a deep feeling of satisfaction. I didn’t even have to say anything to be dismissed or forgotten or ignored when I was with him; he was the ultimate in protective camouflage.

He was the sheath to my knife, the bright distraction that drew all eyes to himself and left very few to scrutinize me. He was perfect for me in a way that would have felt unreal if I didn’t know he snored, and didn’t like to be held while he was waking up.

I didn’t like the fact that my willingness to accommodate him in that last point was enough for him to floridly declare _me_ perfect for him, but, well. You couldn’t have everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this weird, wild ride. Would love to know how you feel about the fic as a whole ;)

**Author's Note:**

> This work was sort of born out of #metoo rage plus me wanting to write a story where a devious, murderous young woman doesn't tragically expire at the end because she used Violence. AKA I'm _still_ mad about the way this one YA book I read ended, so...
> 
> The story is already complete (yay, first draft!!! not bad for a story I wasn't sure I'd finish), and I'll be posting the finished/edited-ish chapters about once a week.


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